Configuration changes in the submission process

Before DSpace 7 two main files were used to configure the submission process

• item-submission.xml
• input-forms.xml

With the switch to DSpace 7 we have decided to revise the concept behind the submission process, as we want to provide a RESTful application and a single-page UI experience (Angular) we don't want to enforce any more the concept of multi-steps wizard in the submission. For such reason we are replacing "Steps" and "Pages" in the above files with a more abstract concept of section that will be rendered by the UIs build on top of the REST API in unpredictable different ways: as panels in the default proposal for the angular UI, maybe as tabs or subsequent pages in custom UIs.

The item-submission.xml

The high-level structure is unchanged, the main difference are:

• each step MUST be defined in the step-definitions section, i.e. it is not anymore possible to define a step inline with the submission-definitions (see below)
• each step MUST have an unique ID (not anymore unnamed step)
• each step represent always a single section, so if previously you have multiple pages to collect metadata now you have different steps, one for each old page
• an attribute mandatory=[true|false] has been introduced on the step element. When false the section must be activated explicitly by the user by mean of an action on the UI or supplying data of interest of the section
• the workflow-editable element has been replaced with a scope element to give more flexibility and make the configuration options for the sections the same available for the single metadata in the input-form.xml (now submission-form.xml)

As each page of the old input-forms now is become a different "step" in the item-submission.xml the item-submission.xml file now manage which metadata are avaialble when a submission is done in a specific collection via the submission-map

The input-forms.xml (now submission-forms.xml)

To reflect the big changes in the file structure and purpose we have renamed the file in submission-forms.xml.

At the highest level the changes are:

• the form-map element is not anymore available, the mapping between collection and sequence of forms is now maintained in a single place the item-submission.xml
• the form > page element is not anymore available. Each form consist of a single page. As said above pages are grouped together in the item-submission.xml

The value-pairs element now automatically define authorities when the value-pair is referenced by a form > fields > field > input-type without the need to manually register the authority in the dspace.cfg

JIRA Issues & PRs related with these changes

https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/pull/1852

https://github.com/DSpace/Rest7Contract/pull/11

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