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you can see such configuration in the "Other materials" collection of the DSpace-CRIS demo and testdrive.
the child field must be in the same page than the parent metadata and listed in the input-forms.xml before than the parent metadata. All the child fields mush be repeatable or less as the parent child. It is not possible to configure a child metadata as repeatable itself, i.e. to allow the user to input several values for a single metadata all associated to the same value of the parent metadata. A possible workaround to this limitation is to configure multiple children metadata such as contributor.department, contributor.department2, etc.
A the database level the values of the children and parent metadata are stored independently to each other. A placeholder (#PLACEHOLDER_PARENT_METADATA_VALUE#) is introduced to guarantee that children metadata are always in the same order and count than the parent metadata also when some "parent value" doesn't have a value for a children metadata (author without affiliation). Such placeholder is skipped in indexing and visualization.
