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Sub-Community Management

DSpace provides an administrative tool‚ 'CommunityFiliator'‚ for managing community sub-structure. Normally this structure seldom changes, but prior to the 1.2 release sub-communities were not supported, so this tool could be used to place existing pre-1.2 communities into a hierarchy. It has two operations, either establishing a community to sub-community relationship, or dis-establishing an existing relationship.

The familiar parent/child metaphor can be used to explain how it works. Every community in DSpace can be either a 'parent' community‚ meaning it has at least one sub-community, or a 'child' community‚ meaning it is a sub-community of another community, or both or neither. In these terms, an 'orphan' is a community that lacks a parent (although it can be a parent); 'orphans' are referred to as 'top-level' communities in the DSpace user-interface, since there is no parent community 'above' them. The first operation‚ establishing a parent/child relationship - can take place between any community and an orphan. The second operation - removing a parent/child relationship‚ will make the child an orphan.

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[dspace]/bin/dspace community-filiator -s -p parentID -c childID

where '-s' or '-set' means establish a relationship whereby the community identified by the '-p' parameter becomes the parent of the community identified by the '-c' parameter. Both the 'parentID' and 'childID' values may be handles or database IDs.

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[dspace]/bin/dspace community-filiator -r -p parentID -c childID

where '-r' or '-remove' means dis-establish the current relationship in which the community identified by 'parentID' is the parent of the community identified by 'childID'. The outcome will be that the 'childID' community will become an orphan, i.e. a top-level community.

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