Usage of the Demonstration Environment
The demonstration environment ("Demo") provides an instance of the ANDS Collections Registry where staff and external partners can experiment with the software without these changes affecting the production registry. This provides a technical staging environment for providers to test the behaviour of their systems when interfacing with the ANDS Collections Registry.
Demo mirrors the production environment. This provides an environment with over 95000 records and behaviour during testing/demonstration will be very similar to production.
Furthermore, Demo provides web services to both the PIDs and DOIs "test" prefixes. Providers should use these services for testing their M2M systems and will no longer be able to access test.ands.org.au for this purpose.
Like the production environment, Demo has its own demonstration portal, Research Data Australia (RDA) Demo.
When to use Demo
The environment should be used for technical staging and demonstration/training purposes.
Examples include:
- testing whether the ANDS Registry can harvest from your newly setup OAI harvest point
- experimental testing of machine-to-machine to "mint" handles or DOIs
- examining the behaviour of a certain RIF-CS element and how it would behave on RDA
- crafting test records for use in training seminars or demonstration of registry software at conferences, etc.
- allowing providers to familiarise themselves with the system (provided there is no expectation that any production records would be created).
When NOT to use Demo
The environment must NOT be used for record staging or quality assessment. The production registry environment provides facilities for such behaviours through the DRAFT statuses and Quality Assessment workflows. There is no mechanism to "migrate" records from the demonstration environment to production. The ANDS Services team does not provide support for such use of the environment.
Availability of and access to Demo
Access to the demonstration environment will be available to any requesting party with a genuine use case. Demo will be available at all times, excluding the 24hrs preceding an ANDS Software release. During this window, the Services team will use the environment to test the deployment of the upcoming release.
As Demo is intended as a technical staging environment, a less aggressive backup strategy will be employed. No users should create production records in this environment.
Please contact services@ands.org.au for any comment, feedback or concern.