several problems in conjunction with nested metadata fields

[saschaszott]

Bug Description

We have added a new inline-group for nested metadata fields in the submission forms configuration file submission-forms.xml (similar to the default inline-group oairecerif.person.affiliation). The inline-group consists of two fields. Both fields are marked as required, and one of them also uses a regular expression (regex) as a validator.

Unfortunately, we have found that form validation for nested metadata fields does not work when the form is submitted. Neither the required attribute is enforced (the form can be submitted successfully), nor is the input value validated against the defined regex.

We were able to reproduce this issue with DSC version 2024.02.00.

Furthermore, we discovered that bulk import via Excel does not work if the file contains fields that are part of an inline-group. We tried importing the two fields of the newly added inline-group using the bulk import, but the system rejected the import with an error message stating that the fields are unknown. The bulk import works correctly for other fields that are not part of an inline-group. The problem can be reproduced with DSC 2024.02.00.

[kshepherd]

Further to this, in my testing I am unable to mark fields as repeatable (e.g. Keyword) within an inline-group. Perhaps this is by design? (I can understand additional complexity if the inline-group itself is already trying to group multiple fields+values together as an array), but I did not see this limitation documented anywhere.

[atarix83]

@kshepherd

This is indeed a limitation of the current implementation: fields within an group/inline-group cannot be marked as repeatable. Addressing this would have required structural changes that would significantly diverge the codebase between DSpace and DSpace-CRIS, so it hasn’t been implemented yet.
Once the code is integrated into DSpace, we can consider discussing a sustainable solution with the community.

[kshepherd]

@atarix83 thanks for the confirmation. In that case, consider my comment just a note and not a bug report