[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Customizing the accessions template

[Valerie Addonizio]

Bri,

In my experience (which is not truth!) I have never been able to customize the accession importer. The Accession importer's mappings are defined very strictly. You can see them here<https://github.com/archivesspace/archivesspace/blob/master/backend/app/converters/accession_converter.rb>. Even without knowledge of Ruby, once you scroll down that page to about Line 33 it is easy to see that the mapping is hard-coded. If you open up the accession import spreadsheet you'll see that that code matches the spreadsheet perfectly, ex. 'accession_title' => 'accession.title' where the first value is the column header from the spreadsheet and the second value is what it maps to in an ASpace accession record. In short, if a column name is not there, it does not process the data, so while a new column may not generate an error, I'm 99% sure you will not see the data imported. Now I'm not sure what happens if you re-use the same column name... that would need experimentation, but I'm not optimistic it would work.

The history of the importers is varied: they were written by different devs at different times with different methods and different use cases, so it does make sense to me that a behavior you rely on in one importer is not present in another. If all of this is correct so far, the only way this could be changed would be with a plugin or a feature request.

-Valerie


From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org <archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org> On Behalf Of McLaughlin, Brianna Jean
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2022 12:31 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Subject: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Customizing the accessions template

Hi everyone,

We are starting to look into the Accessions module. The Accessions template looks pretty simple compared to the Harvard spreadsheet template we're using for importing components. Is it still possible to customize the spreadsheet without preventing a successful import? For example, could we add Agent fields by copy and pasting and adding a "_2"? Could we add more Event fields by following the same structure (ie accessions_deaccession_date). Generally, I'd love to hear any experimentation with customizing the Accessions template and what limits you've encountered.

We're on AS version 2.7.1, likely to be upgrading soon to 3.?

Thanks in advance!

Bri McLaughlin, she/her/hers
Visiting Metadata Services Librarian
Indiana University
812-856-3321

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