Submission date extraction failure is not reported well (and date-guessing heuristics are delicate) #8434
Closed
1 task done
Assignees
Labels
accepted
bug
Something isn't working
component: submit/
contrib-medium
Medium dev difficulty for contribution
minor
Comments
Sign up for free
to subscribe to this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in.
Describe the issue
If a user submits an XML draft with a missing or incomplete date, the submission tool tries to fill in a reasonable guess. The rule is roughly
There's a poorly handled corner case here: if a user provides a year but not a month / day, the date is filled in but only if the year is the current year. If it's any other year, the month and day are left as
None. This leads to an unhandled exception that is logged as a generic "A system error occurred" type message in the submission's history.This appears to have come up for at least one and maybe a couple users following 2025-01-01. I don't have their draft source, but I'm guessing they were using "2024" as the date in their drafts.
To resolve this, we must at least raise a
SubmissionErrorin the date extraction code for the case that we're unable to extract a date. If we raise this with a message that indicates that the problem was in the date element, then it will be reported to the submitter who will then have a useful nudge toward fixing their problem.We might also consider improving the heuristics to look at time intervals rather than calendar years/months for deciding whether it's reasonable to assume "today" or "this month" as the date. That's a bigger can of worms, though.
Code of Conduct
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: