DANDI GUI not downloading draft, only the published version

[cspurandare]

Hello,
I am only of the co-authors for the DANDI set - "Allen Institute Openscope - Vision2Hippocampus project" ID: 000690. To test some "draft" version files, I use the DANDI UI by clicking the "download" button (arrow pointing down) on DANDI. I made sure to navigate to the draft version. Consistently, the asset meta data showed "dateModified": "2026-02-20T20:01:53.997204Z"
When I download though, the stable/older version is downloaded (2024 date modified) not the "draft" version. My collaborators have used the DANDI CLI to download the draft version, so I think this is a bug with the GUI that the download button redirects to the stable/older version. Is this a known issue? Is there a workaround?
Thanks,
Chinmay

[satra]

thanks for the report. could you please tell us the path to an example file so we can take a look.

[jjnesbitt]

@cspurandare How are you determining the date modified of the downloaded asset? The asset date modified is not necessarily the same as that of the downloaded data, for several reasons.

It would be good to have an example asset that exhibits this behavior.

[cspurandare]

Hi Satra and Jacob,
One of the files giving me issues is at the following link - https://dandiarchive.org/dandiset/000690/draft/files?location=sub-695762&page=1 and the first NWB file "sub-695762_ses-1317448357.nwb". When I go in its "Nested Asset Instance" I see the "dateModified": "2026-02-20T20:01:53.997204Z" field. This corresponds to the date the creator of this updated file mentions. I am in the draft location; same file in the published Dandiset has a 2025 date. When I download the related asset with DANDI CLI I get the correct file "8957b441-6010-42f3-a0de-144e9eea9977". But I get the old, non-draft file by the following actions -

1. click on the download button in the DANDI GUI
2. Use the link corresponding to the asset above, but paste it in the browser and download "https://api.dandiarchive.org/api/assets/8957b441-6010-42f3-a0de-144e9eea9977/download/"

Thank you for your help,
Chinmay

[satra]

@cspurandare - this is quite puzzling. on my machine (i used the gui) to download the two and it gave me these two different urls

published: https://api.dandiarchive.org/api/assets/97878bcd-4bda-44e4-b4f9-17489b56ca7d/download/
draft: https://api.dandiarchive.org/api/assets/8957b441-6010-42f3-a0de-144e9eea9977/download/

and the download itself matches the checksums online:

❯ sha256 ~/Downloads/sub-695762_ses-1317448357-draft.nwb
SHA256 (/Users/satra/Downloads/sub-695762_ses-1317448357-draft.nwb) = f22308c694b90d5263bb3bddeea7152714f9b7d688b452a98f4bc3eb79e0dc83
❯ sha256 ~/Downloads/sub-695762_ses-1317448357-published.nwb
SHA256 (/Users/satra/Downloads/sub-695762_ses-1317448357-published.nwb) = c4561322bc0f7d0b07b484adcd8a238af001fe4e9ce857d0f26430ff68feffa0

note that i added draft and published when prompted by the browser.

can you please verify you are in the draft version and the published version when you click download separately? unfortunately, right now, there is no UI element that indicates which version when you are not on the DLP, but the url should show draft or the version number. @jjnesbitt - i'll file an issue for this.