stack-581 Release Notes

stack-581 Release Notes

Summary

Stack-581 continues the platform's investment in two strategic areas: graduating the new Synapse Search experience out of experimental mode and expanding realm support to enable isolated, realm-specific environments on Synapse. In parallel, the release delivers targeted quality-of-life improvements to the Data Access Request (DAR) workflow, the Curator tool, and core data management features.

Users of the Synapse web interface will notice a more polished and complete search experience, including keyword highlighting, richer result descriptions, improved visual design, and a link to the existing People Search. Researchers managing controlled-access datasets benefit from clearer guidance when creating DOIs for non-public entities. Data curators gain column-pinning controls and improved Dataset Collection versioning reliability. Backend reliability improvements address CSV import failures and ensure Google Analytics metrics reflect only production traffic.

20 tickets completed across SWC (17) and PLFM (3) projects. No PORTALS tickets in this release.

Affected Users & Systems

Deprecated or Breaking Changes

There are no breaking or backward-incompatible changes in this release for end users.

New Features

🔍 Synapse Search Enhancements (Search V2 — Exiting Experimental Mode)

The redesigned Synapse Search experience is graduating from experimental mode, with several key capabilities now generally available:

• Search term highlighting — Your query terms are now highlighted throughout search result cards, making it faster to confirm relevance at a glance. (SWC-7615)

• Result descriptions — Search results now display a meaningful description excerpt, giving users more context without needing to click through to every result. (SWC-7724)

• Link to People Search — A dedicated link to user/team search has been added to the search page, bridging the gap until people are included in the default search index. (SWC-7739)

• Updated entity type icons — Entity type icons throughout Search have been refreshed to match the latest design system, making it easier to visually distinguish projects, files, datasets, and more. (SWC-7706)

📋 Curator: Column Pinning

Data curators can now pin the first one or two columns (typically Sample ID and Filename) to the left side of the Curator grid. This keeps key identifiers visible while scrolling horizontally through wide datasets. (SWC-7681)

🔒 Realm-Aware Sharing Settings

Synapse sharing settings now dynamically resolve the correct principal groups (anonymous, authenticated users, public) for the user's realm, rather than relying on hard-coded default-realm IDs. This is a foundational change enabling proper multi-tenant/realm isolation. (SWC-7671)

📑 DOI Creation Clarity for Controlled-Access Entities

Users who attempt to create a DOI for a non-public entity will now encounter clearer guidance and appropriate friction. The intent is to ensure that DOI-linked pages are always reachable — allowing other users to view entity metadata and request access — even when the underlying data is controlled. (SWC-7574)

🏆 Evaluation Queue Filtering for Submission Views

Challenge organizers with access to many evaluation queues can now filter the queue list when configuring the scope for submission views, significantly reducing the time spent scrolling through long lists. (SWC-5242)

🔗 Metadata Task–Grid Session Linking (Platform)

A design and implementation spike was completed to define how executing a metadata task correctly joins or creates the appropriate collaborative grid session. This lays the groundwork for seamless task-to-session handoffs in future releases. (PLFM-9430)

👥 CertifiedUsers Group Support in Non-Default Realms (Platform)

The platform now handles user certification tracking for users in non-default realms, resolving a gap where realm-specific users could not be added to the CertifiedUsers group. (PLFM-9468)

Fixes & Improvements