We are looking forward to releasing RSpace 1.65 by the end of November 2019; this release includes further incremental improvements to Chemistry support, improving links to fixed revisions, and several bug fixes.

Improved chemical metadata display in view and edit mode.

If you are working with a chemical structure, you can now see its metadata in both view mode and edit mode. RSpace also displays metadata properly for reactions, showing metadata for each reactant and product. Below is a screenshot of what you will see when you select a chemical structure when editing – a column appears on the right-and side of the editor pane, with a series of cards displaying the metadata. Each card has small thumbnail of the structure to help distinguish multiple structure cards apart. If you prefer to use the full expanse of the editor pane, you can hide these cards easily.

Linking to fixed revisions of documents

RSpace has always provided a full revision history for individual documents and their  attachments. However, in order to support better the aims of full experimental reproducibility, it’s clear that what’s needed is the ability to fix a snapshot of the whole experimental context at a point-in-time – including fixed versions of attachments, and linked documents. In 1.65, we’ve made it possible to make links to fixed revisions of RSpace documents. Previously, all links were to the current, ‘live’ version of the document. This is the first stage in a sequence of improvements – in 1.66 and 1.67, we will improve the usability of this feature. Here’s what you can do now:

• In the revision history view, there is a new column with a stable link to the revision. You can right-click on a link and ‘Copy Link’.

• Alternatively, if you are already viewing a revision, you can get the link  to the unique ID from the top right-hand corner of the document view:
  

• If you paste this link into an RSpace text field, you get a nice formatted link showing you are linked to a fixed revision:

• Any exports you make of the document will include the fixed version as well, not the live version.

We’ll work to streamline this process over the next few releases, for example by making it easier to browse a revision history to choose the revision you want, and also to convert existing ‘live’ links to fixed links.

Looking further ahead to 1.66, we expect to introduce OAuth authentication flow for our API, further improvements to Chemistry support (searching by reaction components, metadata export, easier copy/pasting of structures), as well as the aforementioned improvements to revision-history linking.

Thanks for reading and for using RSpace!