OpenRefine/OpenRefine: OpenRefine v3.6-rc1

This is the first release candidate of the 3.6 series. Please backup your workspace directory before installing and report any problems that you encounter.

Starting with version 3.6, OpenRefine requires Java 11 or later.

• The user is now warned when applying the "Fill down" or "Blank down" operations with a pending sorting criterion (#3256)
• The import preview refreshing can be disabled (#4009)
• Menu items to reveal collapsed columns were added to the column menus (#4067)
• The path to the refine.ini configuration file can now be changed on the command line (#4113)
• It is now possible to download the JSON representation of the operation history, without resorting to copy and paste (#4498)
• It is now possible to work with Wikibase instances with federation enabled (#4287)
• The merge strategy for statements can be configured in the Wikibase schema editor. This also adds support for deleting statements. Beware that schemas created with earlier versions of OpenRefine will still use the original merge strategy. (#3383, #2116, #4130)
• OpenRefine can edit MediaInfo entities and not just Items (#4270)
• It is possible to disable the new version notification by setting the configuration variable refine.display.new.version.notice=false (#4410)
• The dialog to reorder and delete columns was improved to easily delete most columns (#4557)
• The maximum editing speed and the Wikibase tag to apply to all Wikibase edits is now configurable for each Wikibase instance via its manifest (#3359)
• Extra URL fields in the starting page can be removed thanks to a new button (#4606)
• The "Use values as identifiers" operation now warns that it does not validate the identifiers (#3172)

• A new GREL function, parent, was introduced to obtain the parent element of an XML element (#4181)
• A new GREL function, scriptText, was introduced to obtain the text contained in a <script> or <style> element in HTML (#4189)
• The random (previously randomNumber) GREL function was improved (#3143)
• A new GREL function parseUri was introduced (#1857)
• A new GREL function detectLanguage was introduced (#642)
• New GREL functions encode and decode were introduced (#148)
• The error handling of the pow and exp functions was improved (#3062)
• The division operator returns NaN when computing 0/0 (#377)
• A function timeSinceUnixEpochToDate was introduced, to convert a duration since Epoch to a date object (#608)
• A function replaceEach was introduced, to replace multiple substrings in one go (#2606)

• (from 3.6-rc1 on) We migrated to jQuery 3.6.0. If you are using jQuery in your extension, some jQuery syntaxes that have been deprecated earlier might have been removed. If your extension runs with OpenRefine 3.5.2, you can check the web developer console for warning messages when the extension is used: fixing those should be enough for your extension to be compatible with OpenRefine 3.6 (#4891)

The download links for this release are being prepared. And many bug fixes, see the complete list of changes for 3.6.