Browse by Issued Date hangs

[bkeese]

Describe the bug
Chrome Version 112.0.5615.165
Dspace 7.6

When trying to browse by Issued Date on the entire repository or on a Collection with many items, the page hangs with a "Loading page..." message. This can be seen in all of Indiana University's DSpace 7 instances. For example:

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iuswrtest/browse/dateissued
or
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iuswrtest/browse/dateissued?scope=0f9dddb2-9f11-415a-82dc-59723f1dd88f

An example of it working as expected on a smaller collection:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iuswrtest/browse/dateissued?scope=21bf014b-0e1b-45f9-a6dc-acf3cf9fdcc6

To Reproduce
Click on the first link above.
Observe that the page never finishes displaying the list of items or the starts-with-date filter component.
In the browser dev tools, observe that the items are returned as expected by the API.

Expected behavior
The items should be displayed along with the date filter.

Related work

[tdonohue]

@bkeese : This isn't reproducible on our demo site (currently running pre-7.6.2): https://demo.dspace.org/

That implies to me that it may be caused by an error on your end, or perhaps "bad data". There was an older issue in 7.2 related to bad dates causing this same issue (but it was fixed in 7.3): #1523

My suspicion is you may have an error occurring somewhere and this isn't a bug in DSpace itself. See our troubleshooting guide for details of how to locate such errors: https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSPACE/Troubleshoot+an+error#Troubleshootanerror-DSpace7.x(orabove)

If none of that helps, you also might get more information about an error by spinning up the UI in development mode and point it at your production backend. It's possible the UI in dev mode will give additional error information.

[bkeese]

Thanks. I wonder if the demo instance doesn't have enough data to trigger the problem.

Anyway, I have been trying to start the UI in development mode by changing NODE_ENV to "development" in the pm2 config json, but the UI still seems to spin up in production mode. Is there a doc somewhere with instructions that I am missing?

[tdonohue]

@bkeese : While you are correct that the demo site isn't massive, if this was a global problem / major bug in DSpace, I suspect we would have heard about this on all our mailing lists. So far, you seem to be the only institution reporting this issue. That doesn't mean it isn't a bug...it just means it's much less likely to be a bug until we can reproduce it elsewhere.

By "development mode", I mean just spinning it up via yarn start like the basic instructions in the README: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/blob/main/README.md#running-the-app

You should be able to run it from an entirely separate machine (even your local machine) and simply configure it to point at the production backend to see if that provides more details.

[alexandrevryghem]

@bkeese: This was indeed an issue, but it has been fixed by PR #2722. This new code has already been redeployed on the sandbox.dspace.org website, but it is still reproducible for now on demo.dspace.org.

This was a race condition bug, so that's why it isn't always reproducible (I did notice that it happend more often when there were no results, because the response is processed earlier)

[tdonohue]

@alexandrevryghem : Thanks for making that connection.. I didn't realize this might be related to #2722. Do you see any way to "backport" that smaller fix to the dspace-7_x branch if this is still a race condition there? Or is it too dependent on the other changes in #2722?

[bkeese]

I have been able to track down the cause of this issue in our specific case. It is not caused by the referenced race condition, but rather by a bug in the logic of setting the lower limit of year choices for the date filter. If the earliest issued by date is empty, it will default to the current year instead of the lower limit. This results in the lower limit being higher (or equal to) than the upper limit, which yields zero year options for the filter. To fix it, I changed this line:

dspace-angular/src/app/browse-by/browse-by-date/browse-by-date.component.ts

Line 145 in e1c639e

return new Date().getUTCFullYear();

to:
return new Date(limit).getUTCFullYear();

[tdonohue]

@bkeese : Excellent work. That is a new one. Would you be willing to send us a tiny PR with that fix? It looks like that same line of code exists in the main branch (pre-8.0), so it may be a bug there in that specific scenario too.

[tdonohue]

@bkeese : I've analyzed this in a big more detail today, but have found that your fix in #2809 doesn't appear to work for me?

First, I tried to verify the bug you reported by removing the dc.date.issued metadata field from an item in my DSpace.

• When testing on the main branch of code (pre-8.0), the bug in Browse by Issued Date hangs #2808 is NOT reproducible. It appears this has been fixed already in pre-8.0, but I'm not sure where. It might be in Refactored community & collection pages #2722 as noted by @alexandrevryghem
• When testing on the dspace-7_x branch of code (7.6.x), the bug in Browse by Issued Date hangs #2808 is reproducible. So, this bug definitely still exists in 7.x and should be fixed/patched there.

However, when I tested your PR #2809, this had no impact on the dspace-7_x branch of code. The Browse by Issue Date page still hangs on "Loading page..." and the same behavior happens in the Collection's "Browse by Issue Date" where that Item (with no dc.date.issued field) exists. (All other Collection's Browse by Issue Date works fine though as all their Items have dc.date.issued fields)

So, I'm a bit confused. I definitely agree this bug exists on 7.x as I have found I can reproduce it. But, your fix doesn't seem to work for me. It could be that we need to figure out what fixed this on our main branch and backport it to dspace-7_x.

[alexandrevryghem]

@tdonohue: This was the commit in which I fixed the bug that I referenced. I'll try to open a PR for this on dspace-7_x if I have some time this week/early next week.

[bkeese]

I will do more digging. My PR fixes the case where dc.issued.date exists but is empty. I just removed that empty field and the page hangs again trying to construct that date picker component.
And also... The page sometimes still hangs even after successfully building the date picker. I suspect this is the result of the race condition mentioned above.

[tdonohue]

@bkeese : Before you dig much further, I'd recommend trying the fix that @alexandrevryghem points to in his comment above. It's possible we just need to port that over to 7.x (dspace-7_x) branch.

I'll also see if I can try @alexandrevryghem fix a bit later today on the dspace-7_x branch.

[tdonohue]

I've discovered that, unfortunately commit 6f51bd8 won't apply cleanly to dspace-7_x as these components were renamed between 7.x and main.

It'll require a manual port PR. I don't have time for that today, but would be glad to quickly test it if someone else finds time in the coming days. There's still plenty of time to backport to 7.x, as it's a bug fix.

@alexandrevryghem : Adding you as the assignee for this ticket in case you can find time to backport this fix in the coming days or so. If not, I might be able to get back to this eventually to help out.

[alanorth]

I'm wondering if this is the same issue. I have over 100,000 items in the repository, and my "browse by issue date" only shows the current year in the drop down menu.

I'm not sure because the page doesn't "hang", but I have an obviously incorrect list of years in the drop down menu.

[alexandrevryghem]

@alanorth: I don't think that that's the same issue, but if you want to try it out you can run this branch with your backend to check if somehow this fixes it

[alanorth]

Thanks @alexandrevryghem. With your branch I get two date values now, but it is also not correct:

I don't want to detract from this "hanging" page issue here since this seems to be something else... perhaps I should open a new issue.

[tdonohue]

Closing as this has been fixed by:

• [Port dspace-7_x] Refactored community & collection pages #2832 fixes the issue on the dspace-7_x branch for the 7.6.2 release
• Refactored community & collection pages #2722 fixes the issue on the main branch for the 8.0 release (as it also included refactoring to fix this issue)