#210 Multi User Support

[ingolfsommer]

Hey!

congrats for this great program! and thanks!!

We're using jabref in a group of about 20 people
working on related topics. So it is obvious that we
want to share literature. Typical questions arising
are: 1) does someone already have a specific article?
2) what new articles does a specific user have?

Lets say we have userA and userB sharing their
articles. Since they're working simultaneously there is
no way of guaranteeing that they're not producing
identical keys for different articles (other than
prefixing the keys they generate with their names which
messes up the tex-files they're working on together).

Using the timestamp and owner tags in jabref and a
joint repository (version control system, shared
directory) one is almost there: every user submits
their bibtex files into the repository as
userA_articles.bib
userB_articles.bib
additionally everyone gets a subdirectory to put their
pdfs into
userA/*.pdf
userB/*.pdf

Now the only problem remaining is that jabref does not
allow (yet ;-) to change the default search path
specific for the bibtex-file. That is: when userA
accesses userB's bibtex file, he can't read the pdfs.

One fix to this would be to allow to associate a
default directory with each bibtex file in the
preferences, i.e.
{default_for_bibtexfileA}/*.pdf
{default_for_bibtexfileB}/*.pdf

Another solution is to allow an addon specified in the
bibtex-file specific to the default pdf search path
specified in the preferences, i.e.
{mydefaultpath}/{userA}/*.pdf
{mydefaultpath}/{userB}/*.pdf

Another suggested fix is to use the owner tag in a
similar manner. The latter resulting in the search
strategy:
search pdf in {mydefaultpath}/*.pdf
then in {mydefaultpath}/{owner}/*.pdf

Finally, one could use generic search paths of
directories where to find the pdfs (one default dir for
writing, several dirs for reading).

My personal favourites are the latter three. I guess
one has to find a generic solution to be useful for all
users. Any suggestions on this?

Thanks and best regards,
ingolf

[Morten Omholt Alver]

Logged In: YES
user_id=704995

Adding a database-specific property to override the PDF
directory is quite possible, and probably useful to many
users.

[Martin Lorenz]

Logged In: YES
user_id=896512

I could think of a P2P feature...
see Bibster for an example
http://bibster.semanticweb.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bibster/

[Cesar C. Palerm]

Logged In: YES
user_id=214134

How about just being able to have several users access and
edit the same file at once? Thus the bibliography file can
be shared by all, including the pdfs.
This is something that we would like to do in my group (also
about 15-20 people), where one of the goals is to maintain a
single references file for everyone to use and keep consistent.

[ingolfsommer]

Logged In: YES
user_id=1136892

This works now (thanks, consider this request closed ;-). It
works by using the File>Database properties feature and
entering a relative directory-name. The pdfs will be stored
relative to the directory where the bibtex file resides.