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Known limitations

Note

If you are encountering problems not described here, please open an issue and help improve Islandora Workbench!

parent_id CSV column can only contain one ID

The parent_id column can contain only a single value. In other words, values like id_0029|id_0030 won't work. If you want an item to have multiple parents, you need to use a later update task to assign additional values to the child node's field_member_of field.

Non-ASCII filenames are normalized to their ASCII equivalents.

The HTTP client library Workbench uses, Requests, requires filenames to be encoded as Latin-1, while Drupal requires filenames to be encoded as UTF-8. Normalizing filenames that contain diacritics or non-Latin characters to their ASCII equivalents is a compromise. See this issue for more information.

If Workbench normalizes a filename, it logs the original and the normalized version.

Updating nodes does not create revisions.

This is limitation of Drupal (see this issue).

Password prompt always fails first time, and prompts a second time (which works)

More information is available at this issue.

Workbench doesn't support taxonomy reference fields that use the "Filter by an entity reference View" reference type

Only taxonomy reference fields that use the "Default" reference type are currently supported. As a work around, to populate a "Filter by an entity reference View" field, you can do the following:

  • use term IDs instead of term names or URIs in your input CSV and
  • include require_entity_reference_views: false in your configuration file.

Note that Workbench will not validate values in fields that are configured to use this type of reference. Also, term IDs that are not in the View results will result in the node not being created (Drupal will return a 422 response).

Setting destination filesystem for media is not possible

Drupal's REST interface for file fields does not allow overriding the "upload destination" (filesystem) that is defined in a media type's file field configuration. For example, if a file field is configured to use the "Flysystem: fedora" upload destination, you cannot tell Workbench to use the "Public Files" upload destination instead.

Note that the drupal_filesystem configuration setting only applied to Drupal versions 8.x - 9.1. In Drupal 9.2 or later, this setting is ignored.

Workbench cannot modify media automatically generated by Islandora's microservices

Islandora uses Contexts to initiate the generation of derivative media. Configuration for these Contexts is available in the "Derivatives" section of admin/structure/context. One example of a derivative media is a thumbnail generated on the ingestion of a JPEG original file.

During create or add_media tasks, Workbench cannot modify or even be aware of derivative media automatically generated by Islandora. For example, Workbench can't add alt text to a thumbnail image automatically created by the "Image derivatives" Context. This is because the derivative media are generated asynchronously by Islandora's job processing queue. In other words, there is no predictable relationship between when an "Original file" media is created by Workbench (or uploaded by a user in the Drupal content management forms) and when the "Thumbnail" media is generated by Islandora's microservices. This unpredictability prevents Workbench from knowing when the derivative will be or has been created, making it impossible to have Workbench automatically add alt text to that thumbnail.