#275 crossref field

[Jon Jackson]

I'm new to bibtex, but I got this description of the
crossref field off the web:

crossref
The database key of the entry being cross
referenced. Any fields that are missing from the
current record are inherited from the field being cross
referenced.

I'd like to be able to have an 'inbook' entry, for
example, that cross-references a corresponding 'book'
entry and inherits empty fields from it. At the
moment, I think Jabref does nothing with the crossref
field.

I would like to see the empty fields in an entry
populated with fields from an entry that it crossref's
for the purposes of searching, sorting, and exporting
to HTML, RTF and the like. However, it is better that
fields which were auto-populated are distinquished from
user entered fields, so that they don't get stored in
the .bib file.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Probably there is a missunderstanding in crossref. BibTeX merges things together once creating your bibliography. JabRef does not have to do anything, in fact it MUST NOT fill in fields from the parent record as otherwise the inheritance mechanism in BibTeX is broken.

[Jon Jackson]

I would definitely agree Jabref shouldn't fill in cross ref'd fields in the .bib file, but it could be useful to fill them in when viewing / searching / exporting. I think BibDesk does this, using font colour to distinguish between cross-ref'd and original fields.

[Martin]

As well as the Jabref table displaying inherited entries from crossref, this is also relevant to bibtex key generation.

For example: the year field of the bibtex entry might be empty, because it's cross-ref'd to a particular publication which has a year entry. One might want to generate bibtex keys taking the year into account. But when generating a bibtex key for that article, the year field is empty.

Our bibliography uses extensive cross-referencing, so this is an issue in our case.