In some case you need to store group of related information such as the author and their affiliation as appear in the publication "header", the project title, grantno, funding program related to the publication or the Journal Title, the ISSN, the E-ISSN, etc.
In the first two examples the group of metadata is repeatable, this mean that we need to couple the first value in the "author names" with the first value in the "affiliations" etc.
In other case, also if the information are related to an external entities as in the example of the author affiliation, these information are also needed to be stored / freeze on the item level. For instance you could be interested to know which institutions are listed on a publication as affiliations regardless of the institution that is linked "now" to each authors. Also if you assume to know exactly the affiliation of each author at any time (complete career track) you will be unable to know which institution he has listed in the publication signature (this because the date to use is partially uncertain and also because the author could have made a choice between several institutions depending on the one that have actually supported his publication work).
To meet such requirement, DSpace-CRIS allows you to specify that a metadata is a children to another metadata. To do that in the input form you need to include a <parent> tag in the metadata field definition referring to the parent metadata. For example the following definition will configure the contributor.department as a child of dc.contributor.author
<field> <dc-element>contributor</dc-element> <dc-qualifier>department</dc-qualifier> <label>Author Department</label> <input-type>onebox</input-type> <repeatable>true</repeatable> <parent>dc_contributor_author</parent> <required></required> <hint>Enter an affiliation for each author.</hint> </field>
the child field must be in the same page 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.
