Enhancement idea: Support for fetching arbitrary items sets using metadata values

[mjlassila]

In some DSpace installations, there are only few huge collections and dividing items to smaller sets is done using filters based on metadata values. Therefore it would be practical to be able to fetch items to Omeka
using DSpace 6 /rest/filtered-items -endpoint, which supports querying using metadata field values.

For an example, API call https://demo.dspace.org/rest/filtered-items?query_field[]=dc.contributor.author&query_field[]=dc.creator&query_op[]=contains&query_op[]=matches&query_val[]=Piotr retrieves all items which have string Piotr in dc.creator or dc.contributor fields.

Because query syntax is quite flexible, it is likely that building an UI for query construction is not very useful (at least in my opinion), even though there is a query construction UI in DSpace reporting tool.

This feature would not replace current functionality for fetching items based on community/collections, but add more options to the user.

[patrickmj]

Interesting possibilities with this. You anticipated the concern I had immediately, the building of a UI for query construction. So, do you imagine this looking like an input to enter a complete query string, as constructed within DSpace?

[mjlassila]

Yes, I think that a simple text input for query parameters would be the best option. I have found that it is usually more productive to be able to construct queries by hand instead of graphical query builder.