The following notes give an high level overview of the changes and features that we are planning and developing to make possible the creation of DSpace Entities in DSpace-CRIS but we hope that the approach and implementation can be shared and reused in the basic DSpace.
A collection will be tight to a specific entity type (i.e. we expect collections like people, organisations, publications, etc.). The MyDSpace will allow to specify which entity use before to start a new submission (the new submission button should become a dropdown button) and the submission process will be looked to the selected entity type (no option to switch from a submission in a collection tight to the people entity type to a submission in a collection tight to the publication entity type).
We want to store In the collection metadata, the same metadata used in the item, which entity type is allowed for the collection.
The create and edit collection UIs should be updated to allow to set the entity type in the metadata. The creation of a workspaceitem in a collection should automatically set the entity type in the item inheriting the value from the collection.
The REST should provides search methods to get a list of collections for a specific entity type.
Other features interested by these changes:
- move item (the item should stay in collections bind to the same entity type)
- map item to other collection (as above)
- authorizations: we need an efficient way to discover which entity types are available to an user (i.e. for which entity type the user has add permission on at least one collection that can host such entity)
