DSpace 9.2: Submission Save / Autosave hangs after longer submission process
Дмитрий Черных
Hello everyone,
after upgrading one of our repositories from DSpace 9.1 to 9.2, we started receiving user reports about intermittent issues during the submission process.
Symptoms:
When a user clicks Save in the submission UI, the caption changes to “Saving…” and stays in that state indefinitely.
In some cases, the same behavior happens during autosave — the UI also shows “Saving…” and never recovers.
The page must be refreshed to continue working.
After refresh, some of the recently entered metadata may be lost.
Important detail:
Based on user feedback, this usually occurs when a user spends around 10 minutes editing metadata fields before clicking Save.
These issues did not occur in version 9.1.
Environment / configuration:
OS: Debian 13
PostgreSQL 17
Solr 9.10.0
OpenJDK 21.0.9
Node.js v22.14.0
Tomcat 10
Apache HTTPD as reverse proxy
Questions:
Is this a known issue in DSpace 9.2, especially related to longer metadata editing sessions?
Were there any changes to authentication, XSRF handling, autosave, or submission save logic in 9.2 that could cause this behavior?
Has anyone observed similar behavior where Save or autosave hangs intermittently and data is partially lost after a page refresh?
Any pointers or insights would be greatly appreciated.
Best regards,
Dmytro
DSpace Technical Support
As of today, I've not heard of others encountering this. But, it's still possible we'll receive other reports which could narrow down the issue.
Usually when the user interface "hangs", there's some sort of behind-the-scenes error or issue that has occurred. If you can find that, it may provide more details as to why this is occurring for you, and whether it's something buggy in DSpace itself, or maybe something buggy in a specific configuration or customization.
Claudia Jürgen
since upgrading to 9.2 we are facing the same issues rather frequently,
both on autosave and manual save, not specifically related to long
metadata editing sessions.
There is nothing in the logs.
Did you manage to find a solution?
Sunny greetings
Claudia
Am 05.01.2026 um 22:48 schrieb DSpace Technical Support:
> Hi Dmytro,
>
> As of today, I've not heard of others encountering this. But, it's
> still possible we'll receive other reports which could narrow down the
> issue.
>
> In any case, I would recommend looking first for some underlying errors
> *when the hanging behavior occurs*. This would require reproducing the
> behavior on your end, and looking for errors in either the User
> Interface or backend logs as described in our Troubleshooting
> guide: https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSPACE/Troubleshoot+an+error
>
> Usually when the user interface "hangs", there's some sort of behind-
> the-scenes error or issue that has occurred. If you can find that, it
> may provide more details as to why this is occurring for you, and
> whether it's something buggy in DSpace itself, or maybe something buggy
> in a specific configuration or customization.
>
> Tim
>
> On Sunday, January 4, 2026 at 9:17:27 AM UTC-6 cherni...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> after upgrading one of our repositories from DSpace 9.1 to 9.2, we
> started receiving user reports about intermittent issues during the
> submission process.
>
> Symptoms:
>
> When a user clicks Save in the submission UI, the caption
> changes to “Saving…” and stays in that state indefinitely.
>
> In some cases, the same behavior happens during autosave — the
> UI also shows “Saving…” and never recovers.
>
> The page must be refreshed to continue working.
>
> After refresh, some of the recently entered metadata may be lost.
>
> Important detail:
> Based on user feedback, this usually occurs when a user spends
> around 10 minutes editing metadata fields before clicking Save.
>
> These issues did not occur in version 9.1.
>
> Environment / configuration:
> OS: Debian 13
> PostgreSQL 17
> Solr 9.10.0
> OpenJDK 21.0.9
> Node.js v22.14.0
> Tomcat 10
> Apache HTTPD as reverse proxy
>
> Questions:
>
> Is this a known issue in DSpace 9.2, especially related to
> longer metadata editing sessions?
>
> Were there any changes to authentication, XSRF handling,
> autosave, or submission save logic in 9.2 that could cause this
> behavior?
>
> Has anyone observed similar behavior where Save or autosave
> hangs intermittently and data is partially lost after a page
> refresh?
>
> Any pointers or insights would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Best regards,
> Dmytro
>
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--
Claudia Juergen
Technische Universität Dortmund
Universitätsbibliothek
Bibliotheks-IT
Sebrathweg 9
44149 Dortmund
Tel.: +49 231-755 40 43
Fax: +49 231-755 40 32
claudia...@tu-dortmund.de
www.ub.tu-dortmund.de
Дмитрий Черных
Hi Claudia,
Unfortunately, the solution in my case was to temporarily downgrade all of my DSpace instances back to 9.1.
Later, I upgraded them directly to DSpace 10.0. I have not observed the submission/autosave hanging issue in either 9.1 or 10.0, so it appears to be specific to 9.2.
DSpace 10.0 introduced quite a few other issues for us, although I was eventually able to resolve them.
So, unfortunately, I never found the actual root cause or a fix for this particular problem in 9.2.
Andrew K
DSpace 10.0 introduced quite a few other issues for us, although I was eventually able to resolve them.
WBR,
Andrew
Дмитрий Черных
Issues:
-There was an issue with language-tagged metadata on the item page: fields such as dc.subject, abstracts, etc. were not displayed when their language was different from en (for example, Ukrainian uk values)
- Submission text fields use `autocomplete="off"`, so browsers no longer suggest previously entered authors, publishers, etc.
- Renaming an uploaded file in the submission form did not update correctly and could later prevent the whole item from being saved.
- PDFs were downloaded instead of opening inline in Chrome.
- After fixing inline PDF viewing, browser Back navigation behaved incorrectly.
- Middle-clicking a PDF worked for anonymous users, but for authenticated users it could hang and eventually return a 504.
- Matomo Analytics initially did not track file downloads correctly; after fixing the backend configuration, downloads were recorded but visitor attribution was incorrect.
I was able to fix all of these issues by making changes to the Angular source code.
Pros:
The new "Edit item in Submission mode" is very useful and our users really like it.
Most importantly, DSpace 10.0 has been stable for us. I have not seen the submission/autosave freezes that we experienced with 9.2.
So I would consider 10.0 a worthwhile upgrade from 9.1, but I would definitely test it thoroughly in a test environment first.
Andrew K
Thanks for the valuable information!
Fixing the code does not scare me when AI is at hand. But it looks like waiting at least for 10.1 is reasonable. Luckily, 9.1 is pretty stable for us.
Be safe,
Andrew