Text Service

Text Service is a Ruby on Rails application that provides a searchable, faceted text discovery interface backed by Apache Solr and Blacklight. It is designed to expose Danish text metadata and full-text search across a curated collection, with additional support for snippets, facsimile views, OAI harvesting, and user bookmarks.

• Full-text search for text documents using Blacklight and Solr
• Faceted navigation by year, author, location, text category, genre, and more
• Document detail pages with rich metadata and citation support
• User authentication and session management via Devise (including CAS integration)
• Search history and bookmark management
• Snippet rendering through an external text retrieval service
• Facsimile / image view support for document scans
• OAI endpoint support for metadata harvesting

• The root path is GET /, which maps to the catalog search interface
• Search results are exposed under /text
• Individual document pages are available through Solr-backed solr_documents
• Snippet rendering is accessible from /comment/:id
• Additional pages include periods, authors, and OAI metadata export

• app/controllers/catalog_controller.rb - main search/catalog controller powered by Blacklight
• app/controllers/search_history_controller.rb - search history support
• app/controllers/snippet_controller.rb - renders snippets from the external snippet server
• app/models/file_server.rb - proxies requests to the external text snippet and facsimile service
• config/text_service.yml - environment-specific external service configuration
• Gemfile - application dependencies, including Rails, Blacklight, Solr client libraries, Devise, and Bootstrap

• Ruby 2.7.8 compatible
• Rails 5.2.8
• SQLite3 for local development database
• Apache Solr for search index backend
• External snippet/facsimile server configured in config/text_service.yml
• wkhtmltopdf for PDF generation via wicked_pdf

Prequisite: When running this on newer machines (like anything Ubuntu >24.04), run:

export CFLAGS="-std=gnu11 -Wno-error=incompatible-pointer-types"export RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS="--disable-jit-support"

before installing ruby / rbenv.

1. Install Ruby and the required gems:

bundle install

2. Create and migrate the database:

rails db:create db:migrate

3. Start Solr separately if required by your local setup.

4. Start the Rails server:

rails server

5. Open the application in your browser at http://localhost:3000

The external text retrieval and snippet service settings are stored in config/text_service.yml. The default values are:

• snippet_server_path - base URL for the external snippet service
• snippet_script - rendering script for snippet content
• openSeadragon_script - OpenSeadragon viewer script path
• adl_hostport - host/port used when generating snippet URLs
• image_server_prefix - base URL for image access in facsimile views
• feedback_mail - feedback email address
• external_prefix - external site prefix

Run the Rails test suite with:

rails test

• The application uses the Blacklight library to build the search UI and Solr integration.
• User login is handled with Devise and Devise CAS authenticatable.
• The search interface is primarily configured in app/controllers/catalog_controller.rb.

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