• Immediate search access to local and distributed geospatial catalogues
• Up- and downloading of data, graphics, documents, pdf files and any other content type
• An interactive Web Map Viewer to combine Web Map Services from distributed servers around the world
• Online editing of metadata with a powerful template system
• Scheduled harvesting and synchronization of metadata between distributed catalogs
• Support for OGC-CSW 2.0.2 ISO Profile, OAI-PMH, Z39.50 protocols
• Fine-grained access control with group and user management
• Multi-lingual user interface

User documentation is in the docs submodule in the current repository and is compiled into html pages during a release for publishing on a website.

Developer documentation is also in the docs submodule but is being migrated out of that project into the Readme files in each module in the project. General documentation for the project as a whole is in this Readme and module specific documentation can be found in each module (assuming there is module specific documentation required).

Instructions for setting up a development environment/building Geonetwork/compiling user documentation/making a release see: Software Development Documentation

With regards to testing Geonetwork is a standard Java project and primarily depends on JUnit for testing. However there is a very important issue to consider when writing JUnit tests in Geonetwork and that is the separation between unit tests and integration tests

• Unit Tests - In Geonetwork unit tests should be very very quick to execute and not start up any subsystems of the application in order to keep the execution time of the unit tests very short. Integration tests do not require super classes and any assistance methods can be static imports, for example statically importing org.junit.Assert or org.junit.Assume or org.fao.geonet.Assert.
• Integration Tests - Integration Test typically start much or all of Geonetwork as part of the test and will take longer to run than a unit test. However, even though the tests take longer they should still be implemented in such a way to be as efficient as possible. Starting Geonetwork in a way that isolates each integration test from each other integration test is non-trivial. Because of this there are abstract super classes to assist with this. Many modules have module specific Abstract classes. For example at the time that this is being written domain, core, harvesters and services modules all have module specific super classes that need to be used. (harvesting has 2 superclasses depending on what is to be tested.) The easiest way to learn how to implement an integration test is to search for other integration tests in the same module as the class you want to test. The following list provides a few tips:
  • IMPORTANT: All Integrations tests must end in IntegrationTest. The build system assumes all tests ending in IntegrationTest is an integration test and runs them in a build phase after unit tests. All other tests are assumed to be unit tests.
  • Prefer unit tests over Integration Tests because they are faster.
  • Search the current module for IntegrationTest to find tests to model your integration test against
  • This you might want integration tests for are:
    • Services: If the service already exists and you quick need to write a test to debug/fix its behaviour. If you are writing a new service it is better to use Mockito to mock the dependencies of the service so the test is a unit test.
    • Harvesters
    • A behaviour that crosses much of the full system

org.fao.geonet.utils.GeonetHttpRequestFactory: When making Http requests you should use org.fao.geonet.utils.GeonetHttpRequestFactory instead of directly using HttpClient. This is because there are mock instances of org.fao.geonet.utils.GeonetHttpRequestFactory that can be used to mock responses when performing tests.