I encountered this again today on pre-7.3. It appears that our UI is sending two requests when hitting Browse by Author.

1. /server/api/discover/browses/author/items?scope=[uuid] -> This results in a 500 Exception on the backend, with this error:

   java.lang.IllegalStateException: The requested browse doesn't provide direct access to items you must specify a filter
   at org.dspace.app.rest.repository.BrowseItemLinkRepository.listBrowseItems(BrowseItemLinkRepository.java:82)
   

2. Immediately after that, the correct request is performed: /server/api/discover/browses/author/entries?scope=[uuid]. This request returns results which are displayed on the page.

From the user perspective, the browse by options appear to work. However, they result in this 500 exception appearing in the DSpace logs and in the DevTools of your browser

While the 500 exception seems harmless, we should fix the browse UI code to only make the proper request.

Moving this to 7.4 and flagging as high priority.

I am seeing this exception as well while testing with DSpace 7.3. I have ORCID Authority configured for dc.contributor.author but I get no results at all when going to Browse By Author. Browse By Issue Date, Title, and Subject all work fine.

Interestingly, a direct backend server query on /server/api/discover/browses/author/entries shows author entries. This is both with the HAL Browser and also using Postman for testing. And yet, for some reason, the angular UI does not show any results with Browse By Author.

To be clear, the author browse index is configured as:

webui.browse.index.2 = author:metadataAuthority:dc.contributor.author:authority

Looking at the code and it appears that BrowseByDataType doesn't yet support the "authority" dataType, which is why Browse By Author was showing nothing. Switching back to:

webui.browse.index.2 = author:metadata:dc.contributor.*\,dc.creator:text

and now I see results. Unfortunately, I don't know how this affects the ORCID Authority feature which says to use:

webui.browse.index.2 = author:metadataAuthority:dc.contributor.author:authority