Ares 4.6 Release Notes

A new "Make Available Electronically" button has been added to the Item form. This button will route an Item to the status of Item Available on Electronic Reserves. The button will only be enabled for Items that do not have a Document Type of Hard Copy. See Processing Electronic Items for more information.

On the Course, Item, and User forms, a new "Miscellaneous" ribbon has been added. This ribbon contains the refresh, save, print Item, and browsing buttons. See The User Form, The Course Form, and The Item Form for more details.

Ares will now check the client version to see if it is a supported version. If not, an icon will appear on the bottom left of the client. Clicking the icon will give more details about the version. See Ares End of Support Warning for more information.

Staff users can now update the URL for multiple Items at the same time. When editing the URL for an Item or Shared List Item, Ares will check to see if any other Items or Shared List Items have a matching URL. If so, a prompt will appear with the option to update all URLs to match the change.

If the Loan Period of an Item is changed, Ares will now check to see if there are any other Items within the same semester that contain the same barcode. If so, a message will appear and allow the user to select a synchronization option. See Changing the Loan Period for more information.

In Item search results, the Loan Period field displays as a numeric loan code of 1, 2, 3, etc. An additional Loan Period Description field has been added to the search results grid that will display the Load Period value, such as 2 hours, 1 day, etc.

The "Change Pickup Location" and "Change Processing Site" buttons have been added to the Item list on the Course form.

Item search results now have an Instructor Tags field that contains a comma-separated list of the Instructor tags for each Item.

A "Recent Notes" dropdown has been added to the Add Note form. When adding a note to a User or Item (including copyright notes), the Recent Notes drop-down will appear about the note text area and will show the ten most recently added notes.

Staff users can now delete one or more Items from grids in the Ares client. This is possible on search Item results and any process queues. See Deleting Reserve Items for more information.

A resize feature has been added between the main (left) and details (right) grids on the SharedListItem management form.

The "Nature of Work" field on the Item form can now be cleared by pressing Ctrl+Del or by clicking the X in the field.

Attempting to open an Item that is in processing will now display a message that the Item is already in processing.

For computers that use a high DPI (greater than 100%), a screen resolution of 1280x1024 is now required for all Ares client forms and grids to display properly. See Ares System Requirements for a comprehensive list of all system requirements.

Instructor Tags textbox is adjusted to be the same size as other fields on the Item Details tab.

The 'Search Users' ribbon group sizing was adjusted to display fully when first opening the Client.

Resetting the default layout of the quick access toolbar in the client no longer causes an error.

Adding a splitter between the main area and the right-hand grid no longer prevents an application from closing.

The location Splitter Controls now persist after closing the form.

Some grids and forms in the Ares client were not displaying correctly if the screen resolution was less than 1280x1024.

In the Ares client, when an Authorized User who already existed in the Ares system was added to a course, the User was not being enrolled in the course.

The Save and Refresh buttons on the User form (on the Quick Access Toolbar) are no longer hidden behind the Proxies ribbon.

When entering values on the copyright searching ribbons, the text was displaying backward.

If a staff user tried to hide the System section when customizing the layout of the Ares main form, the Ares client would not close and would lock up.

If a staff user canceled a file upload in the Ares client when using FTP, the file would be deleted from the server but the entry would not be removed from the Electronic Files table.

If the form was opened for an Item that has a Course ID for a Course that does not exist, the form would then suddenly close with no error message.

If the display settings (DPI) on Windows were changed from 100%, some controls in the Ares client would not display.

Ares System Manager server events were displaying as "service1" on event logs. Server events will now display as "Ares System Manager."

If system administrators have monitoring and/or alerting set on the Ares server with a trigger for events listed as "service1", they will need to update it to reflect this change.

The skins file referred to by the Ares Customization Manager, Ares Staff Manager, and Ares client now includes a version number to avoid conflicts and crashing when multiple Atlas Systems products are installed on the same computer.

A Clipboard Wizard Client Addon allows users to customize the information that can be automatically copied from the Item record to the user's clipboard.

Uploading and exporting Server Addons is now completed through the use of .zip files rather than directly copying the code into the Ares Customization Manager.

Fixed an issue where course instructors would not be registered for subscriptions when course creation was enabled for Course & User loads.

Item flags can now be cloned to a new Item. This is set with the "Can Clone" checkbox in the Custom Queues table in the Ares Customization Manager. See Creating Custom Queues for more information.

If CopyrightRequired is set to None, the RequiresCopyright field for an item/shared item will be set to false/unchecked. This will override any option chosen on an HTML form.

The course maintenance process in the CourseUserLoad now ensures that an instructor's full proxies are added as proxy instructors to that instructor's courses regardless of whether the full proxies have the proxy instructor role in the course's validation data.

The free text editor has been updated for proper functionality when using the Blackboard Building Block to edit Courses.

The BasicLTI integration method will now exclude upcoming semesters with future item addition dates from the semester drop-down. This will prevent instructors from creating courses for semesters they can't add Items to.

The following application settings have been added to the AresSystemManager.exe.config file to control the Item Cleanup process: MarkItemsInactiveBatchSize, CleanupFileBatchSize, and LimitCleanupMinutes. See Configuring Item Cleanup for more information about Item Cleanup.

The CCCCatalogURL and CCCCatalogURI customization keys were removed from the database.

The ScanningTempPath key was removed from the database.

The UseSemesters key was removed from the database.

Multiple request forms can now be added for a particular genre with OpenURL mapping. See Displaying Multiple Request Forms for a Genre for more information.

If no Course was selected when submitting an Item through OpenURL, the IRF<Format>.html page would display instead of the IRFOpenURL<Format>.html page when the OpenURL parameter was set to 1.

Log configuration options can now be set directly from the Ares client. This includes changing the logging to DEBUG level. See Ares Client Logging for more information.

The default log.config files for the Ares client, Staff Manager, Customization Manager, System Manager, and web service were updated to preserve file extensions so that rolling logs will now be named like AresClient.1.log instead of AresClient.log.1.

A daily email report of task summaries and errors in the Course and User Load process is available. See Daily Process Reports for more information.

The "Usage Count" field can now be placed on an Item form so that Staff Users can see the total number of views for an Item. See Adding or Removing Fields on Forms for more information.

When performing a custom Course search, the search results will not include a "Registered Users" field. This will show the number of registered (non-instructor and non-proxy) Users that are signed up for a Course.

The file type for exported data from custom searches has been changed from .xls to .xlsx. See Exporting Search Results for more information.

Some custom search fields were not providing a drop-down option. The following fields have been corrected:

• Course custom search: Semester
• Item custom search: Current Status, Loan Period, Pickup Location, Processing Location, Flag
• User custom search: Department, State, Status, User Type

When exporting data from a custom search, an error would occur if the size of the exported file was too large.

When a Shared List Item is added in the Ares client, it will now have the same default values as when a regular Item is added in the client:

• Item Type= Monograph
• Document Type= Hard Copy Reserve Item
• Item Format= Book
• Instructor Provided= No
• Visible to Students= Yes
• Web Proxy= No
• Copyright Required= No
• Copyright Obtained= No
• Digital Item= No
• Ares Document= No

On the Shared List Management form, the Loan Period field was incorrectly displaying the value for Object Type.

When a Shared List Item was added in the Ares client, the "Visible to Students" checkbox was not being marked by default.

Three new parameters were added to the Item TABLE tag. See Ares TABLE Tag for more information.

The new SharedListItemRestrictions table tag is now available. This tag can specify which Shared Lists an Item can be added to. =

Instructors can now add tags to multiple Items at once on the default course Items pages- ICourseInfo.html and UCourseInfo.html. =

The default Ares web pages and the Ares web DLL have been updated to comply with Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 (level AA) guidelines for accessibility. These changes include:

• Using appropriate heading elements to provide a more structured document.
• Annotating different page sections with the appropriate aria role.
• Updating page titles to better reflect the content of the page.
• Changing the color used to style some elements to conform with contrast requirements.
• Adding a skip-to-content link at the top of each page.
• Adding aural notifications when javascript makes dynamic changes to a page's content.
• No longer opening links in a new tab or window.
• Bold elements have been replaced with strong elements.

The "NotEmpty" attribute can now be used with the #CONDITIONAL tag on the Ares web pages. It will evaluate whether a value provided is a blank string or not. See Ares CONDITIONAL Tag for more information

The way #OPTION tags are generated has changed. If no option is selected from a drop-down list, "Choose an Option" will be added. This option will be disabled, and it will not submit an actual value for that input unless the user selects another option.

The way the Ares DLL generates tables on the Ares web pages has changed. Tables are now generated with an action column on the left. This column will contain links for all valid action on its row. See Ares 4.6 Web Page Changes for more information.

Because this is a change in the Ares DLL, all sites that update to Ares 4.6 will see a change in the behavior of tables on their web pages.

Many of the Ares web pages were updated to use the include_head.html page instead of direct references to the CSS and javascript files.

The include_head.html page now adds references to the DataTables CSS and js. These references make use of a CDN outside of the Ares server.

The #PARAM tag is now used on the Ares web pages instead of the #ITEM, #COURSE, and #SHAREDLISTITEM tags.

The title and description that appears on RSS feed pages on browsers can now be customized using keys in the Ares Customization Manager. See RSS Feeds for more information.

The Ares default web pages no longer use the prototype.js, fat.js, or scriptaculous.js files. These have been replaced with the new fadeEffect.js file.

The chat feature was removed from the Ares web pages.

The rich text editor used for Course message boards, TinyMCE, was replaced with CKEditor.

Some fields (mostly the Title and CitedIn fields) were changed from using a "textarea" tag to using an "input type=text."

The Ares web DLL was updated so that it will load Course, Item, and Shared List Item fields into the appropriate parameters before showing pages where those types can be edited.

The query used to determine if an Instructor can see the "Switch to Instructor Mode" or "Switch to Student Mode" on the Ares web pages has been updated. The criteria is now:

• User's UserType = Instructor
• User is a Full Proxy of another Instructor
• User is a course Proxy for a course where:
• The current date falls between the start and stops date of the course
• OR the current date falls between the semester's item addition date and course stop date

The AresAjax.js file was updated to make calls use jQuery. 

If a user tried to perform a custom sort on a table in the Ares web pages after making changes to a course Item, the user would be taken back to the Ares home page. S

Course Proxy Users were not able to enter Instructor mode on the Ares web pages to see future courses.

Fixed

Fixed

Fixed

Changed

The FromName field does not show as a changing field for a new email template

The item call number field is not displayed in the clone course form.

Submitted text with unicode characters or diacritics is not handled properly in the web.

Ares: Empty ListItemID causing "Unable to cast value "" to type Int32." Error

The Ares installer may incorrectly try to add existing document types on an update.

Item tags are cloned in the web regardless of the state of the 'Clone Item Tags' checkbox.

Cloning a course on the web may not set item location and proxy fields correctly.

The Item.LoanPeriodDescription tag is not properly replaced when generating emails.

Rightsholder names longer than 50 characters are truncated when stored in the ItemCopyright table

Ares web alerts contain a time portion that can't be set in the UI

The links to new tags added with the batch tag feature in the web redirect the user to the main menu.

The Ares web service has two log statements that always produce an error.

Changes to the browser emulation mode are not applied until the next time the Client is started.

PasswordHint should be modified to show as a required field on NewUserRegistration.html

The version check does not prevent newer clients from running on older server versions

The IItemDelete page should be removed from new installs

The calculated Page Count field on the Client's item form is cleared when the staff user enters a value into Entire Work Pages

The <#ITEM field='BuildURL'> tag always returns link text now, which may alter some pages that relied on it returning an empty string when the item's link URL was not relevant.

A course's semester is read-only in the web but is displayed in a drop-down that indicates it can be changed.