[referencer] dealing with different entry field requirements

[Davyd Madeley]

On Fri, 2007-04-06 at 05:01 -0400, jcspray at icculus.org wrote:

> There are a few ways to approach this:
>   1. The "if you want anything but article you're on your own"  
> approach (the way referencer is).
>   2. Adding the appropriate custom fields when the user selects a  
> different document type, so they're still getting 2nd class UI, but at  
> least the user doesn't have to know the bibtex to type in.
>   3. A fully dynamic UI, in which fields appear and disappear  
> according to which document type is selected, and there's some  
> indication of which fields are mandatory and which are optional.

I keep coming back to thinking the solution is to provide Referencer
with a series of XML 'definitions' for different referencing styles.
These provide a mapping between internal Referencer names (which I
imagine would look very similar to the bibtex names), external names
(what gets written into the file), DOI entry names (so that the right
field from the DOI metadata gets shoved into the right place) and
perhaps some others (I haven't thought far enough ahead yet).

So you have something like:
<!-- bibtex.xml -->
<types>
 <type name="Article" extname="Article">
  <metadata name="Title" extname="title" doi="title" required="yes" />
  <metadata name="Journal" extname="journal" doi="journal"
required="yes" />
  <metadata name="Language" extname="language" />
  ...
 </type>
 <type name="In Proceedings" extname="InProceedings">
  <metadata name="Title" extname="title" doi="title" required="yes" />
  <metadata name="Book Title" extname="booktitle" doi="journal"
required="yes" />
  <metadata name="Type" extname="type" />
 </type>
</types>

You might then have another XML file for another database format, what
you have to do is somehow merge to two entries for a <type> (so that
each metadata entry is only displayed once. You would then build UIs
straight off this XML. How do you deal with different database formats
requiring different compulsory metadata? I don't know, I don't know how
often that would come up.

--d

-- 
Davyd Madeley

http://www.davyd.id.au/
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