What's New in Grooper 2022

From Grooper Wiki

Welcome to Grooper 2022!


Grooper version 2022 is here!

Below you will find brief descriptions on new and/or changed features. When available, follow any links to extended articles on a topic.

Projects

Projects are a new object in Grooper version 2022. This fundamentally changes the Grooper Node Tree's organization for the better. A Project allows for simplified organization of Grooper assets, such as Content Models, Batch Processes, extractors and profiles, related to a single use case (or "project") into a single location in the Node Tree. No longer do you need to navigate to different locations in the Node Tree to access each of these components. Instead, you can organize all these disparate objects into a single, unified Project.

This architecture also works to maintain reference integrity for objects referenced across multiple Batch Processes and Content Models. When an object refences another object and that object references a third object and that object references yet another, you can form a complicated web of "reference spaghetti", creating dependencies which you may or may not intend, particularly when (either intentionally or accidentally) creating cross references across multiple Content Models. This can cause problems down the road when importing or exporting Grooper objects, publishing Grooper objects to another Grooper Repository, or troubleshooting. The new Projects architecture makes establishing and maintaining references much more explicit and intentional in order to better protect from a mess of interconnected references that is difficult to unravel.

For more information, visit the Project article.

Grooper Web Client

The biggest net-new addition to Grooper in version 2022 is the addition of a web client for user review oriented activities, such as document classification and data extraction review. After installing and configuring the Grooper Web Server, end-level users are able to connect to a web client to process and review Batches, instead of logging into a machine with Grooper Dashboard installed locally.

For more information, visit the Review User Guide and Review Designer Guide articles.

Review Queues

Review Queues are a new replacement for access control lists to make managing review oriented tasks simpler. You can control the work presented to users in the "Batches" and "Tasks" pages in the Grooper Web Client with Review Queues. This allows you to better filter work to your users by defining ACL settings for Batch Processes and/or steps in a Batch Process.

You can also think of this as a "soft security" measure. By filtering out work available to users, it acts as a kind of gatekeeper, controlling what comes across their desk.

  • CAUTION! Please note this is not a "hard security" measure. There are conceivable ways in which a user assigned a certain Review Queue may still be able to access Batch content that is outside of their queue. For true "hard security", the best practice is to isolate that work in a separate Grooper Repository and restrict user access in the Security settings configured on the root node.

For more information, visit the Review Queue article.

Attended Activity Simplification

In previous versions, there were various Attended Activities for each type of user assisted work, such as Image Review, Classify Review, and Data Review. In version 2022, we've condensed all Attended Activities into a single Activity called "Review". This Activity works largely the same as the Review activity in previous versions. Different Views can be added using the Views property. These Views correspond to the previous user assisted Activities. For example, instead of adding a Data Review step to a Batch Process, you will add a Review step with a Data View added. Multiple Views can also be added to a single Review step, which the user can access as tabs in the Attended Client.

This change was made to reduce bloat in the number of Grooper activities and integrate better with the new Web Review and Review Queue architecture.

FYI

The Scan activity is also a Review View in version 2022. If you are scanning physical pages into Grooper, instead of adding a Scan step to a Batch Process, you will add a Review step with a Scan View configured.

For more information, visit the Review User Guide and Review Designer Guide articles.