[Dspace-general] Displaying forms according to content type.

Wed Mar 4 14:36:30 EST 2009

Hi Yuri,

I’m not sure you’re exactly on the right track re: SWORD, but for what it’s worth I think Graham’s suggestion is excellent, and I wish I’d known about it before!

Paulo’s suggestion is similar to something I’ve done, and is possible to achieve without changing source code or creating new interfaces... it’s a good idea too. I wonder if there’s a workflow step that can be added to make the mapping to the “true” collection easier after the “content-type” collection has been used for submission...

I’m now convinced my previous suggestion would be the hardest of the three to implement, and since you’re only wanting to change one small aspect of submission, it’s probably worth looking at an internal Dspace solution.

Cheers,

Kim

From: dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of Yuri
Sent: Thursday, 5 March 2009 7:59 a.m.
To: Graham Triggs
Cc: dspace-general at mit.edu
Subject: Re: [Dspace-general] Displaying forms according to content type.

Well, let me group all the information and conclusions we've got so far.

Kim Shepherd has suggested SWORD as a way of creating alternatives submission interfaces for the content type based submission process we want (this email Kim sent me is attached in the end of this email). We think this is not exactly what we need because we'd ought to have a form with all possibilities (the fields, the attributes) of all content types and then, after the item has been inserted, for example, the item's DB row would have blank fields. Therefore, for us, SWORD is only useful for developing more agile submission apps, other than the web-not-that-agile interface. Let me know, Kim, if our conclusion about SWORD is not correct.

Graham Triggs has said that it is not necessarily that hard to develop a form selector based on content type and has given some instructions about how to do it. After following his instructions and looking at Dspace classes we found that we need to know more about Dspace's structure to feel able to change anything without causing undesired side effects.

Finally, our choice came from the experience told by Paulo Jobim: to create collections related to the content type (books, articles, images, etc) and also collections related to the item's classification (philosophy, sociology, anthropology, etc...). So, we won't have to change the code and we're able to create different forms for each collection, that is, different forms for different content types, dealing with configurations Dspace already provides. The problem is that the item will have to be mapped: after inserting it according to its type, it must be mapped to its classification collection. Our next step is to integrate item mapping into the submission process. Any idea?

Thank you all for the contributions. 

***

Kim's email about SWORD:

> Hi Yuri,
>
> Perhaps SWORD can help -- there are Java and PHP libraries around.
>
> I haven't implemented anything yet myself, but this is the path I'm taking
> to build a submission interface that can handle different forms for
> different resource types without creating extra clutter in the
> collection/community hierarchy.
>
> There is lots of cool stuff SWORD can do, but rather than list it all, I'll
> just give you some links: http://www.swordapp.org/ and
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositor<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD>For
> sh <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD>
> ies/digirep/index/SWORD<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD> 
>
> There is a DSpace SWORD module since 1.4.2 (perhaps earlier?)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Kim
>

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 6:21 AM, Graham Triggs <graham at biomedcentral.com> wrote:

Actually, it isn't necessarily that hard (providing you are using 1.5+, to accomodate altering the order of submission steps, and don't mind the solution being a bit of a hack).

The DCInputsReader that drives the metadata forms already has a form selector based on the collection-handle.

In an ideal world, you may extend the DCInputsReader to provide other selection mechanisms - but you could just take the path of least resistance locally, and simply change the describe step to pass any arbitrary data that you want in place of the collection handle (for example the Mime type) when calling DCInputsReader.getInputs().

Then, in the input-forms.xml, you would have:

 <form-map>
  <name-map collection-handle="default" form-name="traditional" />
  <name-map collection-handle="audio/mpeg" form-name="mp3" />
 </form-map>

 <form-definitions>

  <form name="traditional">
    <page number="1">
      ...
    </page>
  </form>

  <form name="mp3">
    <page number="1">
      ...
    </page>
  </form>

G

On 13/02/2009 13:14, Yuri wrote:

	Robin, I think we should have asked before trying to find a way DSpace
	inside. =P
	Really thank you for your fast answer, Robin.

	Perhaps someone have tried a way of doing it. Anyone? (Even I ask, our
	conclusion is that developing this in DSpace is not that easy.)

	Yuri

	On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Robin Taylor <robin.taylor at ed.ac.uk

	<mailto:robin.taylor at ed.ac.uk>> wrote:

	   Hi Yuri,

	   Unfortunately Dspace doesn't have a type based submission. The best
	   you can do is what you described, have different collections for
	   different types. Sorry to not be of more help.

	   Robin.

	   Robin Taylor
	   Main Library
	   University of Edinburgh
	   Tel. 0131 6515208

	    > -----Original Message-----
	    > From: dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu
	   <mailto:dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu>
	    > [mailto:dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu
	   <mailto:dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu>] On Behalf Of Yuri
	    > Sent: 13 February 2009 12:20

	    > To: dspace-general at mit.edu <mailto:dspace-general at mit.edu>
	    > Subject: [Dspace-general] Displaying forms according to content type.
	    >
	    > Hi everyone.
	    >
	    > Let me introduce my self, once I'm new here and I don't know
	    > how much formal people are here. ;-)
	    >
	    > My name is Yuri Gomes Cardenas, I'm brazilian and study in a

	    > public university (<www.ufsc.br <http://www.ufsc.br>>) which is

	   located in the
	    > south, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina state. I work in a
	    > informatics laboratory (where we use, develop and promote
	    > free software) of the university and the project I'm engaged
	    > now has to do with a digital library with which we aim to
	    > give support to teachers of public high schools, of
	    > philosophy and sociology disciplines. After some search and
	    > attempts, we found DSpace and started learning how this
	    > software works.
	    >
	    > The question is:
	    >
	    > Does anyone know if DSpace has some native mechanism for
	    > displaying the submission forms according to the content
	    > type? That is, once I choose a "audio" content type, the next
	    > steps should display some set of field (obviously, related to
	    > this content type) and if I choose an "article", another set
	    > of fields (not necessarily completely different) are
	    > displayed. We already know that it's possible to change
	    > forms' fields according to Collections, but we do not think
	    > this would be the best way of doing that.
	    >
	    > And I hope my bad written english do not interfere my
	    > threads' understanding. =)
	    >
	    > Thanks in advance.
	    >
	    > Yuri Gomes Cardenas
	    >
	    >

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