[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Oddities when updating Agents via the API

[Mayo, Dave]

There are a lot of sub-records in ASpace that are essentially treated as ephemeral but which have full concrete tables backing them; they’re not addressable in the system, their representations in the JSONModel are as primitive values (strings, array of strings, etc) rather than objects, etc.  Instances are kind of this way – you can’t grab an instance, only the things attached to it, but it has a database ID, etc.

You _might_ be able to insert refs to the subrecords that aren’t changing, rather than the values/records themselves?  That _might_ keep the values the same, but I’m not sure it’ll be legal everywhere.  You could also try explicitly setting created_by and created_at; I am at a conf but could poke at this later (maybe tonight or tomorrow) if you’ll remind me.

--
Dave Mayo (he/him)
Senior Digital Library Software Engineer
Harvard University > HUIT > LTS

From: <archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org> on behalf of Rachel Donahue <rachel.donahue at lac-group.com>
Reply-To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Date: Friday, October 11, 2019 at 11:52 AM
To: "archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org" <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Subject: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Oddities when updating Agents via the API

Hi all,

I'm running some bulk updates to Agents (in this case people) via the API and noticed some rather odd changes to sub-records when I check the JSON after successfully running the update.

1. Every sub-record (e.g. names, telephones) has replaced "created_by" with the user authenticated by the API and create_time with the time of the API call. The Agent itself retains its created_by and time, thankfully, but all the bits and pieces lose it.
2. Possibly related to this, a new telephone number is created even though nothing about the phone number has changed. (e.g. what was /telephone/99 is now /telephone/204)
3. The lock_version for the sub-records isn't changing from 0.

The only thing changing in these updates is the name source and we're using ArchivesSpace 2.6.0. I have been reposting the entire object in the update--is it possible to post *only* the changing fields and perhaps avoid the problem?

While this isn't a make-or-break problem, I'd really like to retain the created_by information for names, as it is often *not* the same as the person who created the initial record. I'm also not sure if this is a bug or something I'm doing wrong. Any insights would be much appreciated!

Best,
Rachel

--

Please note that I currently do not have access to ARS email. If you need to contact me, use my LAC address: rachel.donahue at lac-group.com<mailto:rachel.donahue at lac-group.com>

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