jamie jamison (Apr 03 2026 at 19:19): jamie jamison (Apr 03 2026 at 19:19):One of the patrons wants to change the identifier. It's a health related project, originally 'covidbehindbars'. They wanted to take out the 'covid'.
My concert is how that would affect the the existing files. I don't know how that works internally.
thank you,
jamie
UCLA Dataverse
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 03 2026 at 19:49):Can you please give an example of where we'd see "covidbehindbars"? I do see "bars" at https://dataverse.ucla.edu/api/datasets/export?exporter=dataverse_json&persistentId=doi%3A10.25346/S6/ZD8WTW
jamie jamison (Apr 04 2026 at 03:15):
jamie jamison (Apr 04 2026 at 03:15):https://dataverse.ucla.edu/dataverse/covidbehindbars
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 04 2026 at 12:26):Oh! The identifier (alias) of the collection (dataverse). This is safe to change. Like you said, there's even a UI for it under "general information".
Files and datasets are indexed under the database id of the collection, which you won't be changing, rather than the identifier/alias, which you will be changing. It was a bug over 10 years ago (#1001) but I fixed it before we shipped Dataverse 4.0. :smile:
jamie jamison (Apr 04 2026 at 21:31):Thank you for the clarification. Always good to know how things work under the hood.
By the way, I go back to Dataverse 3.x. That was when the Social Science Data Archive was moved to Harvard Dataverse.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 04 2026 at 21:35):I forgot! Amazing!
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 06 2026 at 20:33):@Julian Gautier thanks for replying on the crosspost! https://groups.google.com/g/dataverse-community/c/g4SbVKuNX2Y/m/jYj7Z43QBAAJ
jamie jamison (Apr 07 2026 at 14:58):Julian's reply was helpful for clarifying what happens if the patron changes the identifier "only drawback to changing the identifier of a dataverse is that anyone who tried to use the URL that has the old identifier will get an error page." I can pass the explaination of what will happen and she can decide what she wants to do.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Apr 07 2026 at 15:17):excellent point
Last updated: May 30 2026 at 09:11 UTC