NMPDR Development Blog

The new attribute system has been ported to the attribute server and now appears to be running fairly well. A few things have changed.

• The find_attributes method, which allowed searching for substrings inside keywords and values, is no longer supported.
• Please note that the hundred-by-hundred attributes have changed. There is now a collection attribute that specifies the names of the collection in which an object participates. So, for example, to get all objects in the Higher Plants collection, you would call $fig->get_attributes(undef, 'collection', 'higher_plants').
• The erase_attribute_entirely method deletes all values for a keyword but does not erase the notion of the keyword itself. That's a good thing, because if you erase the notion in the new system you can't add values back. To add or remove a keyword, you must use the Attribute Control Panel at http://anno-3.nmpdr.org/attrib_server/Attributes.cgi.
• There are currently 3.1 million attributes in the database.