The latest stable version biblio (7.x-1.0-rc4) no longer let me leave the year of publication empty. If I do, I get the following error message: "The Year of Publication field (on the Publication tab) is required."

However, biblio is very picky about what you can enter as year of publication. The help text says: "Enter YYYY, Submitted or In Press."

I use the biblio to maintain a bibliography of manuscripts, and these are not always published, or the exact year of publication may not be known, so given the restrictions on input values currently imposed, I do not think it is a good idea to make this field mandatory.

Ideally, I need to be able to enter values such as:

  • unpublished
  • unknown
  • third century
  • about 430 BC

In Biblio 6.x-1.7 (IIRC), the pseudo-year 9999 was introduced to represent "no year of publication available", and 9998 was used to represent "In Press". For some reason, the default text to show for the value 9999 was set to "Submitted" (and not "Unknown"). While the administrator can change this (in the Styling tab), the help text that tells users what values they're allowed to enter still says "Enter YYYY, Submitted or In Press." after the administrator has made this change

As a quick fix, I think the default value for the pseudo-year 9999 should be set to "Unknown", and the help text for this field should be changed to "Enter YYYY, Unknown or In Press."

See also: http://drupal.org/node/1102666

Comments

gisle’s picture

gisle
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Primary language Norwegian Bokmål
Location Norway
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Completed an incomplete sentence.

gisle’s picture

gisle
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Primary language Norwegian Bokmål
Location Norway
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Added details.

rjerome’s picture

rjerome commented

Nothing has really changed WRT publication year OTHER than the fact that Biblio now respects the "Required" setting on the fields page. If you go to 'admin/config/content/biblio/fields' and open the "Publication" vertical tab, then remove the "Required" flag for "biblio_year" (Year of Publication), you should be back to the previous behavior. If not, let me know.

Ron.

gisle’s picture

gisle
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Primary language Norwegian Bokmål
Location Norway
commented

This does not work. I have removed the "Required" flag for "biblio_year" and i still get the same error message if I leave the "biblio_year" field empty.

However, your reply led me to the panel where I can change the Hint, so as a temporary fix, I shall change the Text to display if no year of publication is available from "Submitted" to "Unknown" (preferences/styling tab), and the Hint for biblio_year to "Enter YYYY, Unknown or In Press" (fields/publication tab).

rjerome’s picture

rjerome commented

OK, I see another little bug now... Removing the "Required" property in the "Common" section does not remove it from all the publication types (as is should). There is still going to be an issue though because if you don't put any value, it will default to 9999 (submitted). Perhaps the real "unknown date" value should be 0, then when sorting by date (descending) , they will be last in the list.

gisle’s picture

gisle
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Primary language Norwegian Bokmål
Location Norway
commented
Priority: Normal » Minor

Thanks for pointing out that the problem is with the setting for the "Common" pseudo-type. I can now work around this by manually removing it from all the various publication types (after removing it from "Common").

I am downgrading the priority of this to "minor" after understanding this workaround.

gisle’s picture

gisle
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Primary language Norwegian Bokmål
Location Norway
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Closed an unclosed bracket.