We are happy to announce that a new Arkindex release is available. You can explore Arkindex and try out the newest features on our demo instance, demo.arkindex.org.

Technical release notes for developers and instance administrators are available here.

Processes

The main evolution of this release is making Worker Activities mandatory for each Workers process. Worker activities permit us to track the progression of a process, which is especially useful for large processes covering millions of elements.

Every Workers process now displays the state of its worker activities in the top menu.

Screenshot 2024-10-25 at 21-45-34 ArkIndex 1.6.5

The asynchronous job that creates the worker activities is now visible to the process creator, amongst the asynchronous jobs shown in the the top navigation bar.

Draining agents

We have also built a feature for system administrators who wish to drain tasks on their ponos agents. Draining means that the agent will not start any new task, but will continue running those that it was already handling. This is useful to cleanly shut an agent down.

Screenshot 2024-10-25 at 21-40-03 arkindex-prod-worker01 Change agent Django site admin
A ponos agent can now refuse tasks

The feature can be setup through the Arkindex admin interface for agents.

Other changes

A few miscenallous changes related to processes:

  • A user can now only see worker types with accessible workers to avoid listing useless types.
  • The arkindex cleanup command now deletes unused worker types.
  • When creating a new worker process, a default name is set using the names of its workers. You can of course still change that name.
  • Ponos agents (Enterprise Edition only) do not delete their artifacts if they are not uploaded correctly. This allows instance administrators to manually recover these artifacts.

Export

We are starting to work on export features directly in Arkindex.
One of the pre-requisites for that work is to be able to get a feature worker version through the API.

A new endpoint RetrieveFeatureWorkerVersion now allows the frontend to get the worker version and its configuration for a specific Arkindex feature, such as file import or exports.

More on that topic in the next releases 1.6.6 & 1.7.0!

Rest API client

Over the past weeks, we have updated a lot of our API Client for Arkindex to replace its usage of the now deprecated APIStar project.
This does not change anything for API client users, but offers a simpler codebase, with better error management, one of the notorious issues with APIStar.

We'll keep improving this part of the Arkindex ecosystem over the next releases, focusing on its loading time performance.

Access Rights

We have updated the access rights for the various worker version endpoints:

  • RetrieveWorkerVersion
  • UpdateWorkerVersion
  • PartialUpdateWorkerVersion

They are now accessible to users with admin access on their parent workers, instead of being limited to ponos tasks.

Miscenallous changes

  • When using the children tree on the right side of an element details, a new link is now present to access directly a child element
  • When populating a dataset, the filters used previously when browsing elements are re-used. A warning is displayed when some filters are not supported to populate the dataset.
  • Worker run filters now have a manual option (same as transcription & classification).
  • Very long strings in the WorkerConfiguration JSON display are now displaying correctly across several lines.
  • An error about datasets was shown to anonymous users when browsing corpus: it is now fixed.