Patches item #2385187, was opened at 2008-12-03 23:08 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by stuartlewis You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=319984&aid=2385187&group_id=19984
Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread, including the initial issue submission, for this request, not just the latest update. Category: None Group: None >Status: Closed >Resolution: Accepted Priority: 5 Private: No Submitted By: Kim Shepherd (kshepherd) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Summary: Fix for toDate method in DCDate Initial Comment: The "toDate" method in org.dspace.content.DCDate (1.4 and 1.5) uses GregorianCalendar to convert a DCDate into a Java Date object. DCDate convention is to store unknown values (eg, month, day, hours, etc) as -1, which is fine for most applications but when setting a GregorianCalendar object, it causes dates to roll back incorrectly. I first noticed this when it was pointed out to me that in Dspace's RSS 2.0 feeds, almost all issue dates are displayed as the year *previous* to the actual issue date, on October 30 10:58pm. When you see what is happening in "toDate", it is clear: > utcGC.set(year, month - 1, day, hours, minutes, seconds); Say I have an issue date of "2008". This line will set utcGC to 2008, then roll back to November 01 2007 when a month of -2 is referenced, then back to October 31 2007 when a day of -1 is referenced. The -1 hour will kick it back to 11pm on the 30th, and so on. I think there are two good solutions to this. The first is to look for alternatives to <pubDate> to use in the RSS feeds. It seems to me that a very large majority of issue dates are just a year or a month and a year, so forcing a fully formatted date string seems strange. (I'm open to the fact that people use dc.date.accessioned in RSS rather than dc.date.issued, but dc.date.issued is the Dspace default and I've seen it used most often when looking at other repos RSS feeds) The second is a small patch to DCDate that will make sure when it is converted to a GregorianCalendar object, temporary 'unknowns' of 0s or 1s are used instead of -1s, to avoid unwanted rollback: This is not a perfect solution by any means, but it means that in situations where we only have a year, or a year and a month for a date like issue date, but something is trying to display that date as a full Java Date object, we'll see more "obvious" defaults like 01 January 00:00, and we'll preserve values that *are* known without rolling them back. I have attached the patch (against 1.5 branch) for your review. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Comment By: Stuart Lewis (stuartlewis) Date: 2009-01-09 20:13 Message: Hi Kim, Thanks for the patch for DCDate. This has been applied ready for DSpace 1.5.2. Thanks, Stuart ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Stuart Lewis (stuartlewis) Date: 2008-12-09 07:09 Message: HI Kim, Thanks for looking into this issue and explaining it so well. I think I'd like to see both of your suggested solutions included. To me using dc.date.accessioned makes more sense. The RSS feed is there (primarily) for human readers, and they, and their feed reader, want to know when new items were added to the repository. They might want the issued date in the RSS feed, but it causes issues with dates being in a non-linear order when viewed with some feed readers. My vote would be to update dspace.cfg so that the default out of the box configuration is to use dc.date.accessioned. It is still configurable if people want to change it back. I think we also need to apply Kim's other fix to DCDate. The toDate method is only called by three other classes: The jspui RSS feed generator, the xmlui feed generator, and a class to assist with the 1.1 version upgrade. So the fix will only help correct the rss feed pub dates, and will arguably create better date for the upgrade script. Thoughts anyone? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=319984&aid=2385187&group_id=19984 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It is the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://p.sf.net/sfu/Xq1LFB _______________________________________________ Dspace-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-devel
