In some case cases, you need to store group groups of related information, such as the author and their affiliation as they appear in the publication "header"“header”, the project title, grantnogrant number, funding program related to the publication, or the Journal Titlejournal title, the ISSN, the E-ISSNE‑ISSN, etc.

In the first two examples, the group of metadata is repeatable, this mean that we need to couple . This means that the first value in the "author names" “author names” must be associated with the first value in the "affiliations" etc“affiliations”, and so on.

Generally, in DSpace you want to solve these scenario , such scenarios are handled by using additional entities linked to link with the item. This is, of course, the proper way to manage the this use case, but supporting additional entities in the system additional entities is not always an option or possible at all the extendfeasible in all contexts. In addition, you could may want to allow the submitter to input proper enter rich, structured information during the item submission, to be saved / consolidated after in stored or later consolidated into a separate entity.

In other casecases, also if even when the information are related refers to an external entities entities—such as in the example of the author affiliation, these affiliations—this information are also needed needs to be stored / freeze on or “frozen” at the item level. For instance, you could may be interested to know in knowing which institutions are listed on as affiliations in a publication as affiliations , regardless of the institution that is linked "now" institutions currently linked to each authors. Also if you assume to know exactly the affiliation of each author at any time (complete career track) you will be unable to know which institution he has listed in the publication signature (this because the date to use is partially uncertain and also because the author could have made a choice between several institutions depending on the one that have actually supported his publication work).author. Even assuming that you can precisely track an author’s affiliations over time (a complete career history), it would still not be possible to determine with certainty which institution the author chose to list in the publication signature. This is because the relevant date may be partially uncertain, and because the author may have selected one institution over another based on which actually supported the work described in the publication.

To meet these requirements, DSpace allows you to create groups of nested metadata in both the submission form To meet such requirement, DSpace allows you to greate groups of nested metadata in the submission for and the item page.

The default group in submission will become the submission form is rendered as a nested form and will be is opened in a modal dialog, in order to isolate the form and create connections define relationships between groups of metadata.

Required Configuration

To use nested metadata groups, update your submission-forms.xml and item-submission.xml:

...

Note: Child forms must be named using the pattern: {parentFormName}-{dc-element}-{dc-qualifier} for the group input type to resolve correctly.

Inline-group group type

A new group type called inline-group has been added to mantain the groups inside the main form and not in a modal, follows and example of config:

...