XNAT 1.8.9 Release Notes

XNAT 1.8.9 contains a wide-ranging set of performance improvements and related issues, driven primarily by the need to support increased scalability and modern authentication methods.

Note: Plugin Compatibility

This release is coupled with the release of Container Service 3.4.0, but does not include breaking changes or change version compatibility for other plugins.

Performance Improvements

As XNAT use cases continue to grow in scale as well as breadth, we recognize the need to support data on previously unimagined magnitudes. XNAT 1.8.9 introduces performance optimizations that were made to be able to support millions of image sessions stored in thousands of projects without affecting the performance of the application itself. While users of large XNAT systems may notice dramatic changes, all users should notice improved response times in these areas.

XNAT-7299: Improve performance of XNAT data listings at scale
XNAT-7311 & XNAT-7845: Improve performance of Project listing API calls on large systems
XNAT-7312: Improve performance of Project-specific experiment listings for label validation
XNAT-7316: Improve performance of Subject selector on Edit Experiment pages on large systems
XNAT-7331: Enable users to create subjects and experiments concurrently in up to 10 threads without degrading performance
XNAT-7703: Add paging support to site-wide APIs used for data listings
XNAT-7796: Improve performance of scan count calculations on large systems
XNAT-7831: Improve synchronization in Direct-to-Archive importers when importing many image sessions at once
XNAT-7832: Eliminate unnecessary caching requests in database queries
XNAT-7833: Prevent application stalls when creating 100,000 image sessions in a project
XNAT-7857: Improve performance of Edit Subject page on large systems by eliminating unnecessary access confirmations
XNAT-7859: Improve performance of permissions service when checking project access

The XNAT API documentation has been updated with regard for the paging support added in XNAT-7703. See Subject API and Experiment API. Additionally, a new Performance panel has been added to the Admin UI. See: Admin UI - Performance

Improved Support for Managing Login Methods

Via plugins such as the XNAT LDAP Authentication Plugin and the XNAT OpenID Plugin, and via the enabledProviders configuration setting in the site Admin UI, administrators can add additional authentication methods and determine which should be available to users. XNAT 1.8.9 adds several improvements to this capability.

XNAT-7666: Improve identification of auth providers by using provider ID rather than auth method
XNAT-7750: Create an API endpoint accessible to all users that lists enabled authentication providers
XNAT-7789: Hide "Forgot Password" functionality if local XNAT authentication is disabled
XNAT-7822 & XNAT-7843: Improve appearance of login page when only non-local authentication methods are enabled

Search Engine and other UI Improvements

Search tables should display more quickly overall thanks to the performance improvements listed above. However, other search functionality and display issues were addressed as well.

Search Engine

XNAT-7371: Prevent over-aggressive deletion of cached searches
XNAT-7749: Enable filtering on column headers in project-level search listings – originally addressed in XNAT 1.8.8.2
XNAT-7782: Fix rendering of HTML in data table listings – originally addressed in XNAT 1.8.8.1
XNAT-7784: Prevent search results from improperly truncating fractional time components
XNAT-7786: Fix errors when using date/time filters in the search engine
XNAT-7798: Address inconsistencies in case sensitivity in cached searches

Other UI Issues

XNAT-7827: Fix CSS conflicts and collisions on the Project page introduced by Bootstrap styles in Custom Forms code
XNAT-7846: Fix bug affecting reliability of subject and experiment counts
XNAT-7850: Fix display bugs affecting redirection of previously logged-in users from the login page to the home page

In addition to these issues, a critical issue affecting stored search permissions was addressed.

Test Support and other Backend Improvements

As a part of overall performance improvements, our development and QA teams discovered the need for improved test support. Several other backend tickets may not have been directly related to large-scale performance, but were addressed as a part of this release.

Test Support

XNAT-7716: Fix bug in custom form REST tests
XNAT-7726: Add test support for legacy plugin versions
XNAT-7763: Improve reliability of SimpleEntityServiceTest
XNAT-7801: Address unit test failures when evaluating certain Hibernate tables

Other Backend Issues

XNAT-6064: Add support for very long values extracted from DICOM fields to xnat:field elements such as (0032,0040) Study Comments
XNAT-6357: Address backend limitation preventing Download Images menu item from loading on large projects
XNAT-7794: Fixed a bug in resource survey reports regarding non-actionable duplicates, which could cause an endless loop of "survey and mitigate" with no action. See the DICOM Survey and Mitigation User Guide for details – originally addressed in XNAT 1.8.8.2
XNAT-7799: Modify XFTItem and OM classes to be serializable
XNAT-7825: Improve BaseElement.getJSONProperty(0 method to check for null values

A note on XNAT-6357 and large downloads: Additional work will be required to address the capability of downloading 10,000+ image sessions via the Download Images page and the XNAT Desktop Client