Dear Devin, Devin Bougie wrote:
> We seem to be unable to delete an abstract using "Modify Record." For > example, if you enter the "Modify Record" interface, select "Abstract," > delete all of the Abstract text (leaving it blank), and then click on "END," > nothing is changed. If you change the abstract to a period ".", however, > that does work. That is a limitation of WebSubmit/BibConvert: When a field is left empty, WebSubmit simply does not create any corresponding file in the submission directory. As a consequence, BibConvert will not include a line for this field in its output. That happens for any field. The simplest workaround I can think of right now is to include an additional line in the BibConvert template to consider the case of an emtpy field. For eg: 520::REPL(EOL,)::MINLW(82)---<datafield tag="520" ind1=" " ind2=" "><subfield code="b"><:ABSTRACT::ABSTRACT:></subfield></datafield> 520::REP(EOL,)::IFDEFP(ABSTRACT,,1)---<datafield tag="520" ind1=" " ind2=" "><subfield code="a"></subfield></datafield> Here the second line generates an output only in the case where ABSTRACT is empty (note that in that case, the first line does not create any output). This could maybe be done on one line, but I have not tested. I once looked at the code of WebSubmit to see that empty fields have been historically specifically removed by WebSubmit. Most probably to not unnecessarily create empty MARC fields for values that have been left empty by the submitters. This is a behavior I would be keen to change, if I were sure that no existing submission is relying on this behavior to work. So your email is a good opportunity for me to ask all users of CDS Invenio if some are relying on this "feature". In any case I can think of several ways to deal with this: 1) A new function in BibConvert to specify that an empty field must (or not) generate a line in the output. Eg: 520::REP(EOL,)::IFEMPTYDOANYWAY() Note that it might be already possible to do this using one of the already existing functions, by digging a bit more on the basis of the above workaround! 2) Add a checkbox next to each WebSubmit element to choose if an empty value for this field should create an empty file in the submission directory or not. 3) Have a CFG_ variable to configure the behavior site-wide. 4) Add a checkbox next to each action (Submit, Modify, etc.) of a submission to configure the behavior of empty fields for this action. After all, we might want to consider empty values at Modify steps, but not Submit ones. What do other people think? Best regards -- Jerome Caffaro ** CERN Document Server ** <http://cds.cern.ch/>
