DSpace 5 and 7: resourcepolicy table contains a lot of rows with null dspace_object column

[Agustina Martinez]

Dear all,

I only happened to notice this in our database very recently as part of our DSpace 7 testing: when running the following query:

// DSpace 5

select * from resourcepolicy where resource_id is null;

// DSpace 7

select * from resourcepolicy where dspace_object is null;

we have more than 30k rows with null values for all columns in the resourcepolicy table.

I thought this was maybe something from the migration to dspace 7 from our dspace5 instance but no, it something that has been there for a long time now.

The only thing I could find out giving any hints is https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/blob/a9edca7f55e297afdac8835de31114a2ad911a22/dspace-api/src/main/java/org/dspace/content/ItemServiceImpl.java#L1042 

where there is a comment about this issue.

Were people aware of this? Is this going to be fixed soon? 

Best,

Agustina

[Tim Donohue]

Hi Agustina,

I believe that issue was already fixed in 6.0 via this PR: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/pull/1454  (I think that code comment you linked to is outdated and somehow was never removed.)

My best guess is that those null values were created in your DSpace 5 site... then they were brought over to DSpace 7 via the upgrade.

If somehow you've found a way to *create more* of these null values in DSpace 7, then that'd definitely be an unknown bug.  I'm not aware of a way to do this (and I ran some quick tests on my local DSpace 7 and I'm not seeing it happen there).

Tim

[Agustina Martinez]

Hi Tim,

Many thanks for the explanation - makes sense and glad to hear that it was solved already. I'll keep an eye and report back if more of those policies are being created in our 7.2.1 test instance (I am assuming it was safe to delete all those empty rows??).

Best,

Agustina