OpenCRVS - v1.2.0-beta

[euanmillar]

Introduction

OpenCRVS - v1.2.0-beta is a pre-release version and therefore not yet available for migrating from 1.1. The beta is released for public feedback, while it undergoes user acceptance testing. The beta is not to be used in production.

We are now commencing our stable release quality assurance process. A stable version is planned for full public release on January 31st 2023.

Read the release notes!
Draft: v1.1.0 to v1.2.* migration notes - still undergoing testing
Release management as a Digital Public Good - what we have learnt so far

OpenCRVS v1.2.0-beta is to be used in conjunction with a forked country configuration release v1.2.0-beta

This release will be maintained for 6 months by the core development team.

The v1.2.0-beta release includes major architectural upgrades and exciting new features!

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Major Features

The following explains in more detail each major feature that has been included in this release.

Vital Statistics Export

Composing the "VS" in OpenCRVS, Vital statistics constitute the collection of statistics on vital events pertaining to the population, including relevant characteristics of the events themselves and also of the persons concerned. They are critical for a wide range of government operations, e.g. population register, national identification system, and other administrative registers, and for commercial enterprises (e.g. life insurance and marketing of products).

Our VS Export feature outputs a sharable, yearly report of registration data without Personally Identifiable Information (PII) for consumption by statisticians in programs such as RStudio (Posit).

User Audit

In OpenCRVS v1.0, we introduced Record Audit, displaying the history of every action that has taken place on a registration. In this release, we expand OpenCRVS' audit capability to allow a system administrator to view every action performed by a single staff member in an easy-to-consume display.

Outbox

Processing the submission of applications off-line or in poor connectivity has been visually redesigned into a new browsable Outbox feature. This makes it super easy to tell which applications have not yet synced nationally.

Advanced Search

Utilising the full power of our ElasticSearch engine, registrars can now perform advanced searches; for example, registrars can search all registrations made in a configurable range of districts or states, between date ranges for a given name or gender and much more! View any record, at any time, without needing to perform an action then bookmark your searches. This feature is fully audited and additionally exposed in an API integration!

Configurable Administrative Levels

With OpenCRVS, governments can create administrative offices virtually anywhere, from a deeply nested rural parish or county or in an urban city ward. No matter how many administrative divisions are relevant for your country, you can now import as many as you like using Humdata standards, and the OpenCRVS address structure will automatically compensate.

Integrations

It is now possible for a system administrator to configure OpenCRVS API integrations for external systems, and refresh credentials, within the OpenCRVS user interface. There is no longer any need to set up system clients using Docker commands. It is easy to set up API access to Advanced Search, FHIR standard Health notifications, Webhooks or National ID systems, including MOSIP. We have worked hard with the MOSIP team to ensure that birth and death events seamlessly orchestrate with MOSIP’s National ID generation and expiration functionality. We have included Postman collections in the country configuration repository and will be updating our documentation thoroughly between now and the stable release.

Introducing Minio in OpenCRVS: An AWS S3 compatible OpenSource and locally hosted Object Store

To make best use of server resources and keep OpenCRVS hosting costs down, application attachments are now saved in Minio, a dedicated object storage system with its own admin interface. Minio provisions automatically for you on your locally hosted OpenCRVS infrastructure. Application attachments now have their own unique URL so they can be cached, and can be externally managed away from the rest of the OpenCRVS document data. Minio is compatible with Amazon S3 giving you the flexibility to adapt and use cloud object storage if you wish.

FHIR Location API

The country configuration package has been heavily refactored to remove unnecessary endpoints such as Locations, because you can now use our FHIR API to do this! You can add/amend/archive administrative hierarchy, offices and facilities using a Gateway endpoint. Check out Swagger documentation on the Gateway.

Form configuration improvements

You can now configure a select field in form config by uploading a CSV file, or by selecting existing datasets like states, districts, facilities etc. You can also create a field which conditionally hides or shows based on the value of another field. Any field can be reordered and all field values can be printed on the certificate if you wish.

Breaking changes - core

v1.2.0-beta includes many migrations to support the new features. These migrations run automatically so you do not need to worry.

Breaking changes - country configuration

The country configuration package has been heavily refactored because:

1. We removed unnecessary endpoints now that Locations API is accessible in Core.

2. Now that administrative structure is managed using Humdata standards, the csv import scripts and file
   Structure has changed. Previous database backups will still work with OpenCRVS.

Our Farajaland backup users have had their usernames changed like this "kennedy.mweene" is now "k.mweene" etc. This is because when any user is edited in the UI, their username changes to this pattern. Our test users were set up incorrectly before.

All database population and backup scripts now take named parameters.

Many content keys have been created for translation requirements for the new features. These will be documented in these notes for the stable release.

Dependency upgrades

Traffic has been upgraded to v2.8.
Create React App has been replaced with Vite meaning much faster builds and smaller docker images!

What's Changed

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This discussion was created from the release OpenCRVS - v1.2.0-beta.