digital-preservation
Better management of profile templates
For the identification DROID creates profile template files based on the signatures. These profile templates are located in the folder .droid6\profile_templates\schema 6.03 within the user's home directory. The files a named like profile.XX.template whereas XX is the version number specified by the Version attribute in the FFSignatureFile element of the signature file. This can lead to conflicts and strange identification behavior if different signatures have the same version number. Also if a new file is uploaded (or an existing one updated) and a profile template with that same version already exists, it is not updated. This leads to some very unexpected behavior if one wants to work on custom signatures. And it is really hard to figure out what went wrong.
To fix this problem two things must change:
- Profile templates must be identified by the signature file name, since the user also selects the signature to be used by its file name. This can be easily done by taking the signature file name and adding a ".profile" or something like this at the end.
- Whenever a user uploads a signature file with a file name that already exists, a new profile template is created and used instead of the existing one, just like the old signature file is also replaced by the newly uploaded one.
This will make it a lot easier to work on custom signatures, without having to update the version number in the root element every time or without having to delete the existing profile templates every time.
For completeness' sake: Droid v6.1 (UI) on Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit with Java 1.6.0_26.
Coming to this issue a loooong time after the original post...
The template files are pre-built databases, essentially just containing all the formats in the signature file (not the signatures themselves).
This could of course lead to inconsistent results if you modify a sig file without changing the version number, and the file formats in the signature file have changed.
I've been doing some work on DROID 6.5-SNAPSHOT to make developing signatures easier, and I hadn't considered the database template issue.
I'll have a look at it, as it could cause weird issues, particularly if people start using the new tools to develop signatures with.
as discussed with @Dclipsham and @sparkhi
agree with the changes 1 & 2 offered by @frog23 Additionally we'll provide a dialog informing of filename clash if any when installing a new signature file, and asking to confirm whether they want to override that existing signature file.
