Error when edit an Item on the Demo site

[paulo-graca]

Describe the bug

On the Demo site (DSpace 9.1-SNAPSHOT and dspace-angular 9.2.0-next), when trying to edit an Item, I'm unable to do it so, seeming that the page is loading indefinitely.

Inspecting the result, I'm getting an error:

main.44fb3bf53a3d1a0e.js:1 ERROR TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'id')
    at Object.next (2306.cec134b81f74a0c6.js:1:11551)
    at P.next (main.44fb3bf53a3d1a0e.js:1:2014365)
    at h._next (main.44fb3bf53a3d1a0e.js:1:2014049)
    at h.next (main.44fb3bf53a3d1a0e.js:1:2013744)
    at main.44fb3bf53a3d1a0e.js:1:2027250
    at c._next (main.44fb3bf53a3d1a0e.js:1:2024913)
    at c.next (main.44fb3bf53a3d1a0e.js:1:2013744)
    at subscribe.E (main.44fb3bf53a3d1a0e.js:1:2032705)
    at c._next (main.44fb3bf53a3d1a0e.js:1:2024913)
    at c.next (main.44fb3bf53a3d1a0e.js:1:2013744)
handleError @ main.44fb3bf53a3d1a0e.js:1
next @ main.44fb3bf53a3d1a0e.js:1
...

If I refresh the page, I'm able to edit the Item.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Login as a "Demo Community Administrator"
2. On "My DSpace" area, pick an Item and Edit it.

Expected behavior

I'm expecting to edit an Item.

[jesielviana]

Hi @paulo-graca, I think this error occurs when you try to edit an item you don’t have permission to edit. I tried editing items from the MyDSpace menu, and that worked fine.

Regarding this, we already have PR #4639, which ensures that users only see the items they have permission to edit in the edit modal view.

[paulo-graca]

Hi @paulo-graca, I think this error occurs when you try to edit an item you don’t have permission to edit. I tried editing items from the MyDSpace menu, and that worked fine.

I don't think so, but I don't exclude that possibility. I was editing items in "MyDSpace" area on the demo site. These random errors also occurs to our users, they think the system is still processing. Sometimes it's related with server response timeout. Perhaps the dspace logs could give us the answer for what could be the problem.

[tdonohue]

@paulo-graca : I'm not able to reproduce this error on demo.dspace.org today. If I login as the "Demo Community Administrator" and go to the "MyDSpace" area, I'm able to edit Items there successfully.

It's possible this was a transient error. Or it could have been caused by someone else logging in as "Demo Community Administrator" and then clicking logout, as that will logout all active sessions.

[paulo-graca]

I'm also unable to reproduce it today. But a session logout should have ended my session, and that wasn’t the case that day. I tried to edit an item and got that error. Then I refreshed the entire page and was able to access the form on page reload. I repeated the same steps for two or three different items, all with the same behavior.
That’s why I reported the error. Unfortunately, I don’t have the same conditions now to reproduce the problem.

[paulo-graca]

Are we able to catch these kinds of errors and ensure that the user’s experience isn’t affected? My assumption was that the system was still processing, but that wasn’t the case — it had already stopped long before.

[jlipka]

@paulo-graca The behavior could be related to this ticket: #4517

[tdonohue]

Because this is not reproducible, I'm going to close this as "cannot reproduce". It is very possible this was related to #4517 (as noted by @jlipka ), in which case we already have a ticket open to discuss that issue.

If we find a way to reproduce this issue again later (& can gather more information), then we can always reopen this in the future.