Single-use links for works?

[awead]

Descriptive summary

There are two kinds of single-use links: download and show. The download link allows downloading the file only, whereas the show link will show you the page where the file is displayed and also lets you download it. Technically, the show link creates a download link when the page is visited.

The problem: the "show page" in this case is the file set page, and it doesn't have the same kind of metadata that would be found in the work page.

A single-use link for works would be more complicated, since it may contain multiple file sets and files, so are these all downloadable too? Or is it only a link to show, and not download anything? It also begs the question, why do we have show links anyway? Why not just allow downloading an individual file and leave it at that.

Related work

psu-libraries/scholarsphere#343

[mjgiarlo]

@awead See also the design we discussed a while back: samvera-deprecated/sufia#1750 (comment) It seems like you've wound up exactly where we did.

Snippet:

1. This [feature] should be implemented in CurationConcerns rather than Sufia.
2. Single-use links will be exposed in the UI for FileSets only (not for GenericWorks or other curation concerns).
3. Only one single-use link will be generated for each FileSet, allowing download access to the original_file within the FileSet.
4. Clicking the single-use link button for a FileSet should not redirect to a new view, but rather it should pop up a (Bootstrap) modal showing the single-use link, highlighted, with a GitHub-like "copy me" button beside it.

Points 2 and 3 seem relevant here, and I still support both. In short, IMO single-use links should only be generated for FileSets (the :original_file for now seems sufficient) and only for download access not for show.

[mjgiarlo]

See also: #883 (comment)

It appears we've discussed this a lot!