Clarification for Browse by Issue Date behaviour

[Julia Gilmore]

Hi DSpace community! 

We've noticed (or rather, it was pointed out to us) that the Browse by Issue Date option returns all results from the selected date forward. This means selecting 2023 from the year dropdown will return items from 2023 onwards. We can see from the URL and in the Browse java file there is a startswith condition: 

https://demo.dspace.org/browse/dateissued?bbm.page=1&startsWith=2023

https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/blob/dspace-8_x/dspace-api/src/main/java/org/dspace/browse/BrowseEngine.java#L380 

We're curious about the logic for this behaviour (especially as you can select a range from the search filter date sliders) and whether it is possible to remove this so only results from the selected year are returned?

Thanks! 

Julia

[Andrew K]

Hi Juilia,

In my DSpace 9.1 that is not the case. Only items of 2023 are displayed.

Note that startsWith=2023 also means that the date starts with 2023 i.e. 2023-01-15 or 2023-12-18 etc.

This looks like a regression in v10.

WBR, Andrew

субота, 1 серпня 2026 р. о 03:09:04 UTC+3 Julia Gilmore пише:

[DSpace Technical Support]

Hi Julia and Andrew,

This was an intentional change to the Browse by Issue Date functionality in DSpace 10.0: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/10055 

It was viewed as a bug fix, I believe because depending on your Browse By settings, older years can often be selected in increments of 5-10 (whereas if only results from the selected year are shown, the Date dropdown would have to include every possible year with no jumps).  More discussion can be seen in the ticket and pull request, and for reference the change was also ported to 9.3, 8.4, and 7.6.7.  

That said, if it feels like a regression then this may be a feature that should be more configurable for users (or at least more clear in the UI as to how the filters work).  If the single-year selection is an important functionality for you, I would recommend creating a ticket to discuss more options.

Thanks! Best,

-Lia