Kia ora koutou,
We’re on 5.8 XMLUI (Mirage2) with an integration with Symplectic Elements – most of our new items are deposited via Elements, and some come across with an embargo specified from that system. They then sit in our backlogged submissions queue until we get time to check and approve them. In some cases, by the time we do this, the embargo has expired, and DSpace gets Very Unhappy with being asked to approve an embargo that’s already expired.
In the past, we recall that it just wouldn’t let you approve it – we thought (but have no documentary proof) that it gave some kind of error message. With a couple of items recently though we didn’t get an error message: DSpace just assigned the item a handle but then refused to put it live. Attempting to approve it again just ended up with it being assigned a second handle(!) and still not live.
Finally we realised what the problem was, removed the expired embargo, and have managed to put the item live. But it’s still got two handles attached to it….
1) Are we imagining that DSpace used to give the user an error message? Is there any simple config (without getting into the java) we can do to get some error message here or do we just need to keep eagle eyes on our submissions as we deal with them?
2) What’s the best way to deal with the extra handle? FWIW the item is currently in our “dark” archive while we sort this out (approved but not readable/searchable/discoverable via any means except to admins). I presumably *could* just delete the extra line from the table in the database but would rather the excess handle went to a tombstone page – but there’s no dead item for that to point to. Or should we just accept the weirdness and allow two handles to point to the one item?
Deborah