Last Meeting’s Minutes

Institutional Updates:

Gordon, representing University of Southern California (USC), joined for first 30 mins in their considering SPARC as a request tracking platform.

Louisiana Clinical & Translational Science Center: 

2/12/2025

• Ying had a Rails 7 email sending related error (initializer can’t load, won’t send email). She fixed and will submit the fix in Pivotal

2/26/2025

• Using upgraded Rails/Ruby in the prod environment

• Getting error ' :exception_recipients => ENV["EXCEPTION_RECIPIENTS"] || %w{admin@example.org}' for the file to customize who will receive exception emails. Used to work before Rails 7. The emails are not encoded in the configuration file. Suggest updating it in the dotenv.example file.

• Reported (SPARCDashboard, SPARCRequest) Documents table Uploaded bug - is not upgrade related since it’s already in prod. It may have been an issue since last bootstrap - needs to be a string.

MUSC:

2/26/2025

• Reminder

  • Migration to Pivotal Tracker (going away end of April 2025) to Jira is underway. Look out for Confluence account invitations if you don’t already have one.

• Upcoming Releases

  • SPARC v3.13.0 - Ruby 3.3.1 & Ruby Rails 7.0.8.1 upgrades - Winter 2025

    • Working on these upgrades with server change; issues resolution

  • SPARCFulfillment v3.6.0 Release - Winter 2025

  • SPARC v3.14.0 Release - Spring 2025

  • SPARCFulfillment v.3.7.0 Ruby & Rails upgrade - Fall 2025

Oregon Health & Science University:

2/12/2025

• Upgraded to 3.12.1 on all servers

2/26/2025

• Not in attendance

Iowa

2/12/2025

• Not in attendance

2/26/2025

• Not in attendance

Case Western

2/12/2025

• Not in attendance

2/26/2025

• Asked if there’s a rake task or programming in newer releases for:

  • Emailing PIs of draft requests. A: The ‘Unsubmitted Request’ feature was added in SPARC v3.12.0 as a SPARC front page alert in these instances, but there is not email notice sent out.

    • Related discussion included Ying’s observation of users' confusion of the Add/Request button in dashboard as being intended to submit more services. Suggested exploring a different label, perhaps ‘Manage Request’.

  • Emailing service providers of outstanding submitted request - for instance if in the status for over 30 days. A: There is not a feature for this, namely due to email fatigue and the status workflows vary among providers. Would require defining statuses for triggers and/or per site or catalog org to define and enable/disable.

  • Jeremy will enter in a story to begin discussions of sites' interest in any of these features

Children’s National

2/12/2025

• Not in attendance

2/26/2025

• Not in attendance

Stony Brook:

2/12/2025

• Not in attendance

2/26/2025

• Not in attendance

Morehouse:

2/12/2025

• Working on test server to build out a Core and test it out

2/26/2025

• Upgrading to latest SPARC releases but having difficulty working through the process from example installation documents since they are intended as examples and is from some time ago. Ying suggested starting with installation under doc folder (dev installation) and then think of what server you’ll use. MUSC will set up a call with Morehouse to talk through their process.

• Will reach out for SPARC review when further along with set up

Discussion:

Introduced the following topic for sites to consider development design to discuss at future meetings. Initial suggestions include changing the language ont he Submission confirmation page and redirect to Dashboard so that it’s not communicating a submission when that may not be the case until after processing.

• (SPARCRequest) Improve Background Submit Process Time - move the submission in SPARC Step 5 to be a background process so as to not hold up the submission process.

  • Current order:

    • user click submit in Step 5, 

    • pop up survey modal,

    • user says no to survey (or yes, completes and goes to next step), 

    • select request to submit pop up modal,

    • user choses requests to send and clicks submit, 

    • [processing occurs] - these are what will move to ‘background’, presenting next part to user 

    • (edited) submission confirmation page displays, 

    • user can go to protocol or otherwise use SPARC.

  • Discussion development method -

    • processing timing & influence

      • what’s currently happening during the ‘click submit’ and confirmation page steps. affects of moving that behind the scenes to allow SPARC navigation

      • consider order with other stories (SPARCRequest) Change When System Satisfaction Survey Appears and (SPARCRequest) Add MOU pop-up when user submits a request, do not proceed unless user agrees

    • is the delivery tied to the service request status change

    • how it handles delays and unsuccessful submits

Open