This repository contains ENA's core data model and infrastructure.
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#####ENA hold date (release date) discrepancy Specifying release dates in request to messages to ENA works differently for new and updated data. According to ENA's programmatic submission guide, the HOLD date specified at the submission level affects all the objects in that submission. The SUBMISSION schema document here tells that it is possible to add multiple HOLD dates inside the submission and that they can be set separately for individual objects by their 'accession' or 'refname' (which we assume includes object alias).
What has been observed in practice is that, although it is possible to add multiple HOLD dates in the submission request, they are only allowed to reference objects by their accession numbers. The archive rejects the submission request if object is referenced by anything other than the accession.
This condition makes adding multiple HOLD dates for new objects impossible as they are never assigned an accession when they are first created. Interestingly, if multiple HOLD dates without accessions are added to the submission then the archive just picks the last one from the list and applies that to every object that has been referenced in the submission. Which would not be right in cases where objects might have different release dates.
The currently implemented workaround for this limitation is a two step process. In the first step, all new objects (with or without release dates) are submitted to the archive in the usual way. Then, in the second step only those objects that have a non-null release date are then submitted to the archive but, only this time they are submitted as an updated object rather than as a new one as done in the previous step. It is so because after the first step all submitted objects then carry an accession number with them and as explained above it is quite easy to specify per object release date when we know the accession number.
Things become simple when handling updates only. It is because objects that are to be updated come with accessions. So this time around it is possible to send just one submission with multiple HOLD dates referencing objects by their accessions and the archive will interpret them correctly thereby updating objects with the right hold date individually. Consequently, the submission service then just sends a single submission message to the archive when its dealing with updates.
This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License - see the LICENSE file for details.