Announcing the XNAT 1.8.8 release
XNAT 1.8.8 is primarily a new feature release, focused on the introduction of Custom Forms as a dramatic improvement over Custom Variables as a means of adding new searchable attributes to existing XNAT data types. Custom Forms can be added to experiments of all types, including imaging and non-imaging data, as well as projects and subjects. The Custom Forms feature required significant work across XNAT and its data models, and is the culmination of nearly two years of development work. More details are available in the XNAT 1.8.8 Release Notes.
We are releasing Custom Forms as a Minimally Viable Product (MVP) release, a fully functional feature with known limitations. In future iterations of Custom Forms, we intend to deprecate and replace legacy Custom Variables and provide an easy migration path. We are eager for feedback from our community of users and admins to help us plan and scope our development, and we encourage feedback via the XNAT Discussion Group.
Other than this major new feature set, this release contains several bugfixes and improvements, including:
Improvements to DICOM importing
Improvements to managing user accounts
Added support for DicomEdit 6.5 (See below)
As always, we recommend upgrading to the latest XNAT versions for best performance.
Upgrading is (fairly) easy!
The upgrade path from XNAT 1.8 to XNAT 1.8.8 is as easy as configuring your war file for the version of Tomcat you're running and dropping the new war file in place. Upgrading from the XNAT 1.7.x line is only mildly more arduous. See the XNAT Upgrade Instructions.
Download XNAT 1.8.8
XNAT Release Notes | XNAT Documentation
Other Updates
DicomEdit 6.5 has been released and bundled with the XNAT 1.8.8 release war. No new action is required for XNAT users or admins. This update adds the ability to include wildcards in "assign-if-exists" statements into your DICOM anonymization scripts. See the DicomEdit 6.5 Release Notes for more detail.
Protocol Validation Pipeline (PIP-2) has been updated as well, and requires the latest version of the legacy XNAT Pipeline Engine to run.
XNAT Desktop Client 3.2.3 will be released soon, updated to include support for DicomEdit 6.5.
Posted May 2, 2023