Bug: Cannot render both WKT point and bounding box in same metadata field (spatialMetadataFields)

[PawelKra]

🚹 Bug: Cannot render both WKT point and bounding box in same metadata field (spatialMetadataFields)

Summary

When using the geospatialMapViewer functionality (introduced in PR [#3540](#3540)) to render maps on item pages, it is not possible to include both a WKT POINT(...) and a bounding box {east=..., south=..., ...} in the same metadata field (e.g., dcterms.spatial), even though the documentation explicitly states this should work.

What happens

If an item has both entries in the same metadata field:

<dcvalue element="dcterms" qualifier="spatial">POINT(21.0122 52.2297)</dcvalue>
<dcvalue element="dcterms" qualifier="spatial">{east=45.0, south=34.5, north=72.0, west=-25.0, accuracyLevel=0}</dcvalue>

The Angular frontend throws the following error:

Could not parse point from WKT string: undefined, error: Unable to parse: Parse error on line 1:
{EAST=45.0, SOUTH=34
^
Expecting 'POINT', ...

As a result, the map fails to render the bounding box, and may break entirely.

Expected behavior

According to the documentation:
https://github.com/kshepherd/dspace-geospatial-maps-doc/blob/main/README.md

You may use the same field for point and bounding box data – only valid points will be shown as markers, and only valid shapes will be drawn as rectangles.

The frontend should:

• Treat POINT(...) or lat,lon values as points
• Treat {east=..., south=..., ...} values as bounding boxes
• Gracefully skip bbox strings during WKT parsing (rather than throw an error)

Suggested fix

In geospatial.functions.ts, the parseGeoJsonFromMetadataValue() function should skip values that start with { to avoid passing them to the WKT parser:

if (value.startsWith('{')) {
  return null; // or throw new SkipThisValueError(), depending on existing structure
}

Alternatively, introduce separate configuration options in geospatialMapViewer for pointFields and bboxFields to prevent misinterpretation of mixed metadata.

Environment

• DSpace Angular UI with geospatial PR Geospatial maps for item pages, search, browse #3540
• DSpace 9.1 (tested with Docker build July 2025)
• Angular logs showing failure in parseGeoJsonFromMetadataValue
• Browsers: Chrome, Firefox

---

[tdonohue]

@PawelKra : Thanks for reporting this. Since you already have a "suggested fix", would you mind creating a Pull Request with your fix in it? (assuming that fix is working for you) We take code contributions from anyone as DSpace is built/maintained by volunteers.

@kshepherd : pinging you just because you may be interested in reviewing this.

[kshepherd]

thanks, I'll test this - it certainly works in my original implementation (as per screenshots) and I thought i was logging errors on parse errors rather than throwing or re-throwing. I'll look into it - the suggested fix makes sense, but I think I could also probably catch these Parse exceptions and handle them more gracefully in general, right?
But that said, any short-cut in skipping non-WKT strings during WKT specific processing is also good.