Assign author as person to store personal data
Automatically match the author to a person in the database to make authors uniquely identifable beyond their name as database objects (e.g. if authors share a name, right now they are treated as the same author). Possible solution could be to use an author key, e.g. authorlastname-
Blueprint information
- Status:
- Complete
- Approver:
- None
- Priority:
- Medium
- Drafter:
- None
- Direction:
- Approved
- Assignee:
- None
- Definition:
- Approved
- Series goal:
- Accepted for 10.08beta
- Implementation:
-
Implemented
- Milestone target:
-
beta1
- Started by
- Prunus dulcis
- Completed by
- Prunus dulcis
Related branches
Related bugs
Sprints
Whiteboard
For now works like this:
1. Edit a bibliography entry.
2. Ctrl-Click on author-name
3. in appearing person editor window, add year of birth
4. note key up in the person editor (basically lastname, firstname birthyear [probably followed by a letter, to make it more unique, if that key without or other letter is already taken]
5. adjust the author entry in the bibliography to be the same as the key in the person editor window and SAVE BIBLIOGRAPHY and PERSON
6. now you can Ctrl-click on author in Bibliography-Editor or click on the author name in Author-Tree and the author with his/her details should be loaded again
ToDo:
Adjust export, to write author names to a custom field 'authorsKeys', as to make sure, other programs do not get to parse the key but just the names
Adjust import, to read authorsKeys and use it as authors field in case it exists
Problems may occur during export or import - will have to think the process through more thoroughly...
Either the key could be removed, but then the identity would be lost at import.
Or the key could probably be kept but that would break compatibility with other programs. Or the key could be stored in a custom field together with the name - that may work.
STILL, the person itself would not be saved.
Probably another task for the backup-procedure...
One problem with key generation is, that the private authors of other users cannot be seen, thus keys are only unique for one user and even then only, if no other previously private author of another user with the same key changes to public. How to deal with these collisions I am not sure - maybe a merge-dialog in this case would be appropriate (check when saving an author as public, if there are other authors with the same key and present merge options).
