Wrapping up 2023

Our activities in 2023 were focused on further development, documentation, and support to genebanks in evaluation of GGCE. The goal was to bring GGCE into production use in at least two genebanks, and, in the process, design and implement new features directly applicable for use in other genebanks.

We presented GGCE at various meetings and workshops to a total of 38 genebanks, and invited individual staff from five genebanks to try out GGCE on our Demo instance. Six genebanks are using GGCE for managing all or part of their collection in 2023, and a further two are very close to going to production.

Releases

We prepared eight releases of GGCE in 2023, each with additional tools for technicians, curators and genebank managers. Each release is accompanied by release notes that highlight the new features and any significant changes to the underlying workings of GGCE.

GGCE 2023.1 provides improved support for the last viability test of seed inventories. The Distribution module includes reporting of SMTA distributions to the ITPGRFA Secretariat directly from GGCE. It also enables printing of labels for material included in order requests. We redesigned our OAuth services, allowing for monitoring of issued tokens and their direct revocation. And since most GGCE installations use a single-node setup (i.e. are not clustered), GGCE will now default to EhCache instead of Hazelcast cache library for better performance.

GGCE 2023.2 upgraded to React 18 and Webpack 5, adding the field to apply the different types of curation to accessions, enabling print labels when new material is registered in the Acquisition tool, adding full-screen mode on tablets and mobiles, showing the list of inventory SPLIT actions completed in the last month to help decide if the inventory still needs to be split, and the new KPI metrics comparison over a period of time.

GGCE 2023.3 introduces the initial support to the In vitro collection, as well, allowing to change the quantity to shipped to a set of order items, ranking the preferred inventory for distribution, displaying the pathogen status in the requested items grid, scanning the barcode with the camera in the search filtering, shows the snack bar with the number of successfully uploaded accessions to Genesys, and other improvements that you can see in the complete list of changes mentioned before.

GGCE 2023.4 release introduces the Help options that link to the external documentation site of GGCE, the Multiplication section that allows creating an order, improvements for scanning barcodes adding the camera controls, the Supplies module for registering assets (medium) as well as Monitoring and Discard sections for In vitro collection support.

GGCE 2023.5 adds adding inventories from the accession detail page, making it easier to manage the schedule by enabling bulk updates for selected actions, filtering by coded descriptors. It now displays the number of records loaded and displayed next to the total number of all available records. Reorder table columns was improved by adding the move column buttons. Your selection of zoom and torch (flashlight) camera settings will be remembered and applied the next time you scan a barcode.

GGCE 2023.6 is the preview of the next version of GGCE API /api/v2, and the new implementation of BrAPI 2.1 but remaining compatible with 1.3 and 2.0. SOAP endpoints are improved for a better experience with the Curator Tool. For the UI (User Interface), enables filtering accessions and inventories by their names, adds the units filter for inventories, and improves filtering in the Storage Navigator. A number of your suggestions for improvements were addressed for the Distribution module.

GGCE 2023.7 adds support for initial seed viability and type of germplasm storage to report the type of storage in MCPD, filtering by inventory number, ability to filter items within request, and an updated Multiplication tool for in vitro collections. System inventories cannot be edited or removed anymore. For the server, 2023.7 adds support for initial seed viability, recording of Storage Type (STORAGE in MCPD) for each inventory, and logging of email messages for auditing purposes. The main update in this version is improvements to GGCE SOAP endpoints, which now provide for much better compatibility with the Curator Tool.

GGCE 2023.8 improves the attachment handling in GGCE: the files are streamed directly between the client and server and multiple attachments can use the same file in the repository. A new tool for migrating attachment files from GG to GGCE is available. The Curator Tool now manage efficiently the lookups for GGCE instance with a large number of records, and the update of GRIN taxonomy data is again possible. It allows for recording if results of viability tests are conclusive or inconclusive.

Translations

GGCE is developed in English and translated to Spanish. Translations to Arabic, French, Traditional Chinese and Russian are contributed by community members. Thank you!