Dear list,
I would like to know your opinion on new developments on metadata section hiding.
Currently is only possible to make the full metadata record available or not to a certain group or to public guests. With metadata section hiding it would be possible to hide only parts of a metadata.
A draft proposal for metadata hiding is in
http://trac.osgeo.org/geonetwork/wiki/HiddenElements
From the UI point of view, in the editor page there should be a checbox/button to hide a particular metadata section. Elements to hide could be limited to a certain subset to make the interface not too crowded.
This would probably imply some modifications on the DB, as explained in point 3 of the proposal, and a way to access and hide single elements using xPath expressions. A new db table, dependent on operationAllowed, would probably contain just metadata id and xpath expression.
An important implication is in the lucene indexing: do we want to perform search on an element even if it's not visible? If so, one cold get a record as a result of a search but not be able to view the information he is looking for. On the other hand if the search must exclude metadata with hidden elements, indexing must be modified and take into account accessibility to subelements by different groups.
A configuration file, based on xPath expressions, could be used to let the administrator choose which elements can be hidden/shown by users, to make the editor not too overcrowded with buttons.
Regards
Stefano