Linked collection/dataverse not appearing as expected

[paul....@ubc.ca]

Hi Dataverse group,

We're having an unusual issue which I hope someone can shed some light on.

Some background: we began with v4.20 and are now up to v5.6 (and have been for a while)

The problem:

Our Dataverse installation relies quite heavily on linked Dataverses. Collections are often linked to form a larger collection.

We noticed that the counts of items were a bit low, so we decided to reindex to see if this would fix that problem. Upon reindexing, it now seems that collections that are linked no longer show the contents of the linked collection.

That is:

Expected behaviour:

Collection A
  - Collection A studies
  - Collection B linked collection entry
    -Collection B studies

That is, the studies from Collection B will appear while looking at Collection A. At the very least, this was the behaviour with v4.20.

Actual behaviour:

Collection A
    - Collection A studies
    - Collection B linked collection entry

That is, none of the studies appearing with collection B (or any other linked collections) appear in Collection A, with the exception of the entry with a pointer to the linked collection itself.

If Collection A had 10 studies and Collection B had 20, the expectation would be that Collection A would have 31 items. All the studies plus the top level of Collection B.

The actual behaviour is that Collection A contains 11 entries, 10 studies from Collection A and the top level of Collection B.

 Worse, none of the sub-collections are searched when searching from the top (ie, Collection A). Should A not contain any studies of its own, being a collection of linked entries, it would appear entirely empty.

Note that the structure within our system is like this, which I imagine is not atypical:
-Root
    -Collection A
    -Collection B
         -Collection Bsub1
    -Collection C
    etc.

There are no studies under root, only collections.

This is a problem for us, because after our most recent reindexing 90% of our collection is not findable from where you would expect. That is, you can find everything in the Root dataverse, but descending to Collection A you only see Collection A despite linking Collection B into Collection A. And everyone is used to going straight to Collection A and not searching off the Root.

I suspect that this may be related to issue 6898: https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/6898 which was ostensibly resolved in PR 6981 with the release of v5.0: https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/pull/6981

It may be a reversion that crept in somewhere, or the behaviour has changed more dramatically than the documentation would suggest.

We would like to avoid linking individual studies into collections. It was my impression that this was the purpose of being able to link collections rather than studies.

If anyone could offer a solution or pointers, we would be very grateful.

Paul

[Philip Durbin]

Hi Paul,

I think this may be a known issue.

I went to our test suite and found a test I wrote called testDeepLinks that calls into a function called createDataverseLink. I wrote this back in late 2020 while doing some light investigation into https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/7430 which has a title of "Linked dataverses dont (always) show up in their linking dataverses". It was opened for Dataverse 5.1.1 and you're on 5.6. I don't know how things are for 5.10.1, the current version. Linking collections to each other is a superuser feature or I'd ask you to try to replicate the problem at https://demo.dataverse.org .

For now, can you please leave a comment on #7430 and link back to this thread?

If you (or anyone) can play around with and improve that testDeepLinks test, it would be appreciated. More and better tests will help us feel confident that features are working as expected.

Thanks,

Phil

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Philip Durbin
Software Developer for http://dataverse.org
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/people/philip-durbin