FAQ

Axiell Collections is an HTML5 web-based Collections Management System (CMS) that runs in any modern browser, notably Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. No browser plug-ins are required.

It is highly recommended that you use the latest version of your preferred browser and keep it up to date.

Check whether a filter is active; a filter is essentially a persistent search statement that is automatically added to every search query until you disable it. When a filter is active when you restore a group, any records in the group that meet the filter's search criteria will be filtered out and will not be restored.

If there is a filter icon beside the name of the current data source in the Title bar, a filter is active:

Full details about filters and how to deactivate them can be found here.

Full Text indexing was made available to Application Administrators with the release of Axiell Designer An application for administration and customization of Axiell Collections. Amongst other things, field labels, tooltips, values in drop lists, etc. are specified and translated in Designer. version 7.8 and Collections 1.14. If implemented (and it is optional), a single Full Text index table per .inf file replaces all Free Text index tables, all non-unique Text (term) index tables and the wordlist table, with the result that SQL queries are simpler and more efficient.

When Full Text indexing has been implemented in a data source The management of a collection can involve a vast amount of information about objects / items / books, people and organizations, events, administration and more. This information is stored as records in data sources. Each data source stores a specific type of information: details about collection items, people, events, loans, and so on.:

• Search performance in long text fields, fields with unique terms, fields with non-unique terms and Linked fields A type of field used to link one record to another. A Linked field is a drop list of values (records that the field can link to). When a link is made, the field stores a reference to the linked record (a linkref). can be improved.
•  In such fields:
  • Phrase searching is available. The contains phrase and does not contain phrase search operators are available in a Standard search; contains phrase is available in an Advanced search1 Collections version 1.16 onwards..
  • The starts with operator is available in a Standard and Advanced2 Collections version 1.16 onwards. search. starts with is useful when searching long text fields as it allows you to search for the first word in the field, in contrast to equals which searches for your search term anywhere in the field.
  • The containsany and containsall search operators are available in an Advanced search3 Collections version 1.16 onwards..

• Can improve searches where values include special characters (commas, hyphens, brackets, etc.) as these characters or combinations of characters can be omitted4 Collections version 1.15 onwards..

Details about implementing Full Text indexing can be found in the Axiell Designer Online Help.

If your organization's Axiell Collections licence has expired, you will receive a message similar to the following when trying to log in (after which login fails):

Contact Support for assistance.

If all licences available to your organization are currently being used, you will receive a message similar to the following when attempting to log in (after which login fails):

A licence will become available immediately when at least one user logs out of Collections by selecting Account>Log out from the Main menu; if a user does not log out correctly and simply closes the browser or tab in which they were working, their licence will be released after 5 minutes (from version 1.9.6 onwards) or when an Administrator manually releases it.

Note: In a Hosted environment it is important to log out of Collections (select Account>Log out from the Main menu) rather than simply close the browser tab or browser in which you are working so that your licence is immediately freed-up for another user.

Note that Collections counts licences in use per browser, so if a user has a session open in two browsers, this will use two licences.

When you are logged in to a Collections application it is possible5 Collections 1.9.3 onwards to open it in multiple tabs in a browser; this allows you to work on different things in Collections at the same time (e.g. searching on one tab, adding a new record in another, viewing different records on different tabs, and so on). Logging out logs you out of all instances of Collections in tabs in the current browser, and in any other instances of the browser if it was opened as another window.

Note however: if your institution has more than one Collections application installed on the same server (e.g. Production and Training) and you are logged in to one and then log in to another on a different tab in the same browser, you will be logged out of the first.

This occurs when more than one Collections application is installed on the same server and in the same domain (the domain is bold in these examples), e.g.:

https://supp-srv-01.adlibsoft.com/production

and

https://supp-srv-01.adlibsoft.com/training

The explanation for this behaviour is that ASP.Net sessions are shared among browser tabs on a domain basis; as a result, a new application session is created when you log in to a different instance of the Collections application and any open session in another tab is automatically lost.

The solution is either to have a separate domain for each instance of the Collections application or, more simply, to use a separate browser for each Collections application.

Possibly!

Axiell Collections features a unique MS Office plug-in called Axiell OfficeConnect, which enables users of Word, Excel and PowerPoint to search their Collections data directly from the Office application.

Note: This plug-in was designed for desktop users of office rather than Office365 cloud users.

Data from the database will show in Office (if access is allowed) and the user can insert images and (html) formatted data into an Office document or automatically create a table by selecting multiple records. With OfficeConnect it is possible to build documents / reports using information managed in Axiell Collections without having to use an Axiell user interface at all. This type of reporting is available to users who do not need to work in Axiell Collections.

Any part of the Collections database can be configured to be available in MS Office while respecting access rights.

Details about OfficeConnect can be found in a PDF here.

Note: Although this PDF was produced for Adlib (the desktop predecessor of Axiell Collections), the broad techniques described apply to Collections.

A record's unique identifier is its priref, a number allocated when a record is created. Currently, the simplest way to view a record's unique identifier is to add the priref column to Result set View.

Although no third-party report generator is required to build reports in Collections, if your reporting needs are not met by Collections' in-built reporting facility, integration with powerful reporting tools like MS Power BI is supported by the Collections WebAPI. Application Administrators can find details about the Collections WebAPI here (or contact Support for details).

Details about reporting in Collections can be found here.

Here we see the Publish on web (publish_on_web (wp)) field on the Management details tab:

When a checkbox is not selected (it does not contain a tick), it is obviously empty and its value is NULL.

To search for records in which the Publish on web checkbox is unticked, we could perform the following Advanced search:

publish_on_web = ""

When a checkbox is ticked, the value it holds is an x.

To return records where the Publish on web checkbox is ticked, we could perform either of the following searches:

publish_on_web = x

-OR-

publish_on_web = *

(return all records in which the Publish on web field contains a value).

Knowing that the value in a ticked checkbox is an x is important when performing a search and replace on a checkbox or when adding a tick to a checkbox when importing data.

There are several reasons why a search might not return all the records you might expect to see. It is possible that your search terms are excluding records (adjust your search terms); or that you are not authorized to see all records (speak to your Application Administrator); or perhaps there is an active filter that is filtering out records. A filter is essentially a persistent search statement that is automatically added to every search query until you disable it.

If there is a filter icon beside the name of the current data source in the Title bar, a filter is active:

Full details about filters and how to deactivate them can be found here.

The following only affects data sources without Full text indexing.

Some background (this is explained in more detail here): not all fields in Collections are indexed. When you search a data source The management of a collection can involve a vast amount of information about objects / items / books, people and organizations, events, administration and more. This information is stored as records in data sources. Each data source stores a specific type of information: details about collection items, people, events, loans, and so on. using the Standard tab of the Search box, only indexed fields are made available for searching. For our purposes, a field can be indexed in one of two ways: the entire contents of the field is indexed as a single value, a Text (term) index, or each word in a field is indexed separately, a Free text index.

The issue: from Collections 1.16 onwards, the search operator drop list in a Standard search includes the contains all, contains any and contains phrase search operators; at the moment however, when searching fields with a Free text index, contains any and contains phrase behave as contains all, locating the search value anywhere in the search field (it is worth mentioning that contains phrase has in fact always performed a contains all search in Free text indexed fields).

This will be changed in a future release.

Here we see the Publish on web (publish_on_web (wp)) field on the Management details tab:

When a checkbox is not selected (it does not contain a tick), it is obviously empty and its value is NULL.

To search for records in which the Publish on web checkbox is unticked, we could perform the following Advanced search:

publish_on_web = ""

If all we need to do is return records where the Publish on web checkbox is ticked, we could perform the following search (return all records in which the Publish on web field contains a value):

publish_on_web = *

But how do we perform a search and replace on a checkbox or add a tick to a checkbox when importing data? The answer is x: when a checkbox is selected, the value stored in the field is an x.

Note: Thus, a search for publish_on_web = x will also return all records where the Publish on web checkbox is ticked.

To search for records where the Publish on web checkbox is ticked and remove the tick, we search for x and replace it with nothing:

If we want to import records into Collections in which the Publish on web checkbox is ticked, the value we import into the field is an x.

We demonstrate how to filter items (rows) in a table using Result set View; the method is similar in other tables.

It is possible to filter records on the values in one or more columns so that only records that match the filtering condition are listed.

To filter records based on the values in a column:

1. Click the three vertically aligned dots in a column header (title in this example) and select Filter from the menu:

   

   1. Depending on the field type you will be able to:
      1. Select a value from a drop list:

         

         -OR-

      1. Select an operator from the drop list:

         

         Operator	Details
         is equal to	All records that do not match the filter value are filtered out.
         contains	All records that do not match contain the filter value are filtered out.
         starts with	All records that do not start with the specified character(s) are filtered out.
         ends with	All records that do not end with the specified character(s) are filtered out.

         Note: The filter ignores case and diacritics (accents etc.)

      2. And then enter a value in the text box:

         

2. Select Filter.

   All records that do not meet the condition set by the operator and value are filtered out. In this example, only records where the value contains the anywhere in the title field are listed:

   

   Note the filter icon in the column header indicating that a filter has been specified on this column.

3. To further filter the records listed, we could modify the filter on the title column or add another filter on one of the other columns.

   Note: If you need to filter records by values in a field that is not included in the Result set View, it is possible to add (and remove) columns in the Result set settings box, which is accessed by selecting Settings in the Result set View toolbar.

4. To remove the filter, select Clear.

A simple way to change the order of columns temporarily in any table in Collections is to:

1. Click anywhere in a column header and hold down the mouse button.
2. Drag left or right and release the mouse button.

This is not a permanent change to the order of columns.

For a permanent change to the order of columns in Result set View, select Settings in the Result set View toolbar:

Details here.

Field groups can be configured to display as table grids. In versions of Collections prior to version 1.11, grids have a fixed height with a vertical scrollbar to scroll through all the rows. With Collections 1.11 onwards it is possible to change the height of table grids, to show more or fewer rows by default for instance.

In Display mode, hover the cursor over the corner icon (six small dots in a triangle) in the bottom right corner of the grid until it changes to a double arrow:

Hold the left mouse button down and drag the icon up or down to change the height of the grid; let go of the mouse button to fix the height. The new height of this box is remembered for you by Collections:

A number of Views include a Reset option that will restore the default settings of the View without affecting every other settings across Collections:

• Result set View
• Record details View
• Gallery View

To reset all settings across Collections, use the Account>Settings option in the Main menu.

There are broadly two types of Collections installation:

• In most cases a single instance of the Collections application is installed and accessed by all staff.
• In some large organizations comprising multiple institutions, each institution has its own installation of the same Collections application. For our purposes we call this a multi-tenancy installation.

Multi-tenancy

Some large organizations comprising multiple institutions may require each institution to use its own version of the same Collections application.

Consider the ACME Museum Group, which comprises 10 separate museums. A single database is used by the entire group, and each museum is only permitted access to its own object data, with Head Office having access to all object data.

In this case:

• A single Axiell Collections installation is set-up on the web server, accessible to all museums in the group.
• Within this single Axiell Collections installation on the web server, each museum has a folder that contains an instance of the same Collections application, XPlus for example.
• The organization as a whole shares a SQL Server database and each museum in the Group is only permitted to access its own data. This is achieved by assigning each museum a database record number range for any database tables that will hold their data:
  • The structure of a table in the database is specified in a .inf file in the \data directory: the structure of the Thesaurus table, for example, is called thesau.inf.
  • By default, each .inf specifies a single dataset A record number range in a database table used to group similar types of records. A database table will always have one dataset (with the full range of record numbers), but there may be one or more sub-divisions within this record number range. It is possible to work with (e.g. search) a sub-divided dataset or the full dataset (each sub-division simultaneously). Each dataset is considered a data source in its own right. with a lower and upper record number limit. It is possible to specify multiple datasets in a .inf file however, one for each institution for instance, each with a specific record number range.

    In this example, the folder for each museum includes a \data directory and a copy of the .inf files.

    If the Thesaurus table should be available to all museums, we would not specify record number ranges for each museum in thesau.inf and all records in the Thesaurus table would be accessible to every museum in the group. On the other hand, if each museum should only have access to its own object data, a record number range would be specified for each museum in both intern.inf and extern.inf and a copy of these .inf files would be copied to the \data directory for each museum.

  See What is a .inf file? for more details.

In this example, access to records by Head Office could be handled through access rights (giving Head Office access to each museum application, or perhaps there could be an additional XPlus application for Head Office with .inf files specifying the entire record number range).

Multiple environments

While most organizations deploy a single Collections application that is accessed by all staff, an organization can have more than one Axiell Collections environment: Test, Training, Development and Production for example.

The Collections application is deployed in each environment and (usually) has a separate SQL Server database and perhaps different access rights.

See 5. Deploy the Axiell Collections package for details

Multiple environments and Multi-tenancy

As we've seen:

• Each environment has its own SQL database.
• Each institution in a multi-tenancy group has its own Collections application and .inf file that specifies a record number range.

So, for an organization with ten museums in a multi-tenancy installation with more than one environment, Development and Production for example:

• The Axiell Collections software is deployed in IIS in the Development environment.
• The settings.xml file in the Development environment references the 10 Collections applications in the 10 sub folders of the Development environment.
• This is replicated in the Production environment but with a different SQL Server database referenced in each .inf files.

Where a single instance of the Collections application is installed and accessed by all staff, the typical SessionManager setting is:

SessionManager Id="SQL"

Note that when SessionManager Id="SQL", all domain users are able to access the application. If this is not desirable, either:

• Limit user access using the rights mechanism in Axiell Designer.

  -OR-

• Set Id="Multi" and configure a multi-tenancy SessionManager to restrict login to one or more Active Directory groups.

With SessionManager Id="Multi" we set up a multi-tenancy / group session manager to restrict login to one or more Active Directory groups. It is used for:

• Multi-tenancy installations (where each institution in an organization - individual museums in a Museum group for instance - has its own installation of the same Collections application).
• Any institution that wants to limit access to Collections to one or more Active Directory groups.

See Installing Axiell Collections Software for details.

The Axiell WebAPI is a command library that can be used to interact with SQL Server Axiell Collections databases. Using this WebAPI you can easily build your own applications through one of the three available methods: Url requests, Adlib.Data Windows dll or jQuery plugin.

Application Administrators can find details about the Collections WebAPI here.

Integration with third-party reporting tools

Although no third-party report generator is required to build reports in Collections, if your reporting needs are not met by Collections' in-built reporting facility, integration with powerful reporting tools like MS Power BI is supported by the Collections WebAPI.

A .inf file stores the specification of the structure of a single table in the Collections SQL Server database, without the actual data. For example, thesau.inf holds details of the Thesaurus table. The file specifies all properties of the available fields in the table, their indexes, datasets (named, limited record number ranges), internal links and links to other tables. These files can be edited in Axiell Designer.

Datasets

A dataset is a subdivision of a database table by record number range. By default, a single dataset is defined for a table. The dataset specifies a record number range with a lower limit and an upper limit. In this example, we see that borrower.inf has a single dataset defined with a name of borrower and a record number range of 1 to 2,147,483,646 (this is the maximum number of records in a Collections database):

With Axiell Designer, it is possible to define multiple datasets for a database table however, each with a name and record number range. In this way a database table can be partitioned for various reasons, such as logically grouping similar types of records with a particular record number range. A Library Catalogue database might be partitioned into a books dataset, an articles dataset, a serials dataset, and an audio-visual materials dataset.

Tip: The data sources that a user chooses from in the UI of Collections are typically associated with a dataset rather than the entire database.

Specifying datasets to partition a database is also used to control access to particular records (or rather records within a particular number range).

For example, in a multi-tenancy installation of Axiell Collections a single database is accessed by all museums in a Museum group, but each museum may only be permitted access to its own object data. The Thesaurus table might be made available to all museums. In this case a single dataset would be defined in thesau.inf. However, if each museum should only have access to its own objects, then a record number range would be specified for each museum in both intern.inf and extern.inf and each museum would be restricted to accessing its datasets.

Details about how Collections can be configured with settings.xml can be found here.

The Online Help will not be accessible from within Collections if your organization restricts the Collections server to the local network so that it has no connection to the internet (typically done for security reasons).

See <Help> in 5. Installing the Axiell Collections software for more details and a solution

There are various ways to open the Internet Information Services Manager.

In Windows 10:

1. Click the magnifying icon in the Taskbar.
2. Type IIS.

In Windows Server:

1. Click the Windows button.
2. Click the magnifying icon (typically top right of the screen).
3. Type IIS.

This method should work for most versions of Windows and Windows Server:

1. Press the Windows button + R on your keyboard to open the Run window.
2. Type inetmgr:

   

3. Click Ok.

Run as Administrator

If using a PC running a Windows operating system (such as Windows 10) rather than Windows Server, it is a good idea to run IIS as an Administrator.

In Windows 10, the simplest way to locate IIS is to search for IIS and select Run as Administrator:

Alternatively, locate the IIS program icon, right-click it and select Run as Administrator.

What is an Application Pool?

For our purposes, multi-tenancy describes an environment where a single Collections installation (IIS application) runs multiple Collections applications, where access rights and settings determine which Collections application a particular tenant / institution has access to and in which part of the database tables records are written.

Multi-tenancy occurs when an organization comprising multiple institutions (individual museums within a museum group for instance) requires each institution to use its own version of the same Collections application typically to restrict a museum's access to its own data within a shared database.

Consider the ACME Museum Group, which comprises 10 separate museums. A single database is used by the entire group, and each museum is only permitted access to its own object data, with Head Office having access to all object data.

In this case:

• A single Axiell Collections installation is set-up on the web server, accessible to all museums in the group.
• Within this single Axiell Collections installation on the web server, each museum has a folder that contains an instance of the same Collections application, XPlus for example.
• The organization as a whole shares a SQL Server database and each museum in the Group is only permitted to access its own data. This is achieved by assigning each museum a database record number range for any database tables that will hold their data:
  • The structure of a table in the database is specified in a .inf file in the \data directory: the structure of the Thesaurus table, for example, is called thesau.inf.
  • By default, each .inf specifies a single dataset A record number range in a database table used to group similar types of records. A database table will always have one dataset (with the full range of record numbers), but there may be one or more sub-divisions within this record number range. It is possible to work with (e.g. search) a sub-divided dataset or the full dataset (each sub-division simultaneously). Each dataset is considered a data source in its own right. with a lower and upper record number limit. It is possible to specify multiple datasets in a .inf file however, one for each institution for instance, each with a specific record number range.

    In this example, the folder for each museum includes a \data directory and a copy of the .inf files.

    If the Thesaurus table should be available to all museums, we would not specify record number ranges for each museum in thesau.inf and all records in the Thesaurus table would be accessible to every museum in the group. On the other hand, if each museum should only have access to its own object data, a record number range would be specified for each museum in both intern.inf and extern.inf and a copy of these .inf files would be copied to the \data directory for each museum.

  See What is a .inf file? for more details.

In this example, access to records by Head Office could be handled through access rights (giving Head Office access to each museum application, or perhaps there could be an additional XPlus application for Head Office with .inf files specifying the entire record number range).

Collections application uses Anonymous Authentication rather than a specific user. We point it at the Application pool identity, which has been specified in the Application pool - an account that can read the Collections / Model application files.

Link to where the Application pool identity is specified

In IIS:

1. Select the Axiell Collections web service (under Default Web Site).

   Note: In this example, the Axiell Collections web service is called Collections, but it can be given any name during deployment of the Axiell Collections core software.

2. Double-click Authentication to display the Authentication screen:

   

3. On the Authentication screen, select Anonymous Authentication.
4. Select Edit to display the Edit Anonymous Authentication Credentials dialogue.
5. Select the radio button for Application pool identity:

   

6. Click Ok.