#1221 Customising and Sorting Required BibTeX entry types

[GreyMatters]

Jabref 2.10 seems to have changed which fields are considered Required and Optional for common BibTeX entry types such as Article.

In addition, when you try to over-ride the new defaults by using the "Customise entry type" dialogue, the changes that you apply with this dialogue are soon reset by Jabef (possibly at the next Autosave of a .bib file, but I'm not sure of this).

It also seems that you can no longer change the default order for Required entry types (as they appear in the tabbed panel below the entry table).
For example, the default order for Required entry types for an Article is now alphabetical: Author, Journal, Title, Volume, Year. If you add Pages as a Required field for Article, then no matter where you choose to customise its position in the Required list, JabRef will at first show your chosen order and then a few minutes later, without exiting JabRef or doing any further editing of the file except to navigate to other entries in the .bib file, the displayed order of the Required fields will be reset (apparently spontaneously) to alphabetical order. When this happens, Pages will be relocated to lie in alphabetical order between Journal and Title, which is an absurd order to use.

This may not be a fatal, or even data-threatening, bug, but it is intensely annoying.
Can the previously stable behaviour of the "Customise entry types" dialogue be restored, please?
In particular, can JabRef be prevented from over-riding the user's customised choice and order of entries?

None of these problems were noticed with any previous version of JabRef: I've used every version since 2.4.

[jwq]

I agree, this is intensely annoying, and we're not alone. Mentions of this bug on the mailing list include [Jabref-users] Customize entry types where Oliver Koop requests a bug report be filed and [Jabref-users] customize field order.

Possibly related: Bug #1141 Customize entry type.

[Stefan Björk]

+1

[Alastair Moore]

+1

[François Charette]

Seems to be fixed with pull request https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/pull/90
I would appreciate if other users could test the fix and confirm whether it indeed solves the reported problems. On my environment I could no longer reproduce the issue.

[François Charette]

BTW: a workaround is possible. Under Preferences->File->Field Saving Options select "Sort fields in old fashion (as ver 2.9.2)". But it has the disadvantage of changing the ordering and some other aspects of the way the records are saved in the bib file.

[François Charette]

NB: this is a duplicate of #1261 and (partly) #1243.

1141 seems to be a different issue.