Re: [Jabref-users] Groups using not possible

[Haines B. <ha...@hi...>]

On Sun, Jun 12, 2016 at 04:31:54PM +0200, Tob...@gm... wrote:
> Dear Haines,
> 

> I'm sorry for the problems you have with the way Jabref handles groups
> in the new version. Let me explain what happened: Previously, the
> group membership was stored at the end of the file in one of these
> Jabref comments. This behaviour had some disadvantages, so we changed
> it. Now Jabref rembers the group information in the bibtex entry
> itself (BibEntry). So your entries now have a groups field (have a
> look at the bibtex source), where the names of the static groups are
> saved.  Because only the names of the groups are stored in this new
> field, JabRef can no longer differentiate between groups with the same
> name. This might be a bit inconvienent, but you can fix it easily by
> giving the groups different names and then manually correcting the
> assignments.
>
>  I hope this helps for now. If you still experience problems, please
> post them on github. https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/issues Best,
> Tobias

I did as you suggested by submitting a problem to GitHub. However, I
also would like to expand on my point here because people should be
alerted to the fact that the shift from placing groups in a database
jabref-meta: groupstree to a groups (BibEntry) section in particular
entries undoubtedly brought with it a significant loss of information
for many others besides myself. They may not yet be aware of it yet.

The groups tree was designed to be hierarchical, and surely there are
many besides myself who use the same group names at different places in
a database's tree. I fail to see why this information was simply
destroyed quietly without offering a way to avoid it. For example,
suppose a hierarchy of groups like this where the group "a" appears
twice:

  1
    A
      a
  2
    B
      a
  3
    C
      d

The hierarchy Could have been preserved by distinguishing a
comma-separated and semi-colon separated list. For example,

  Groups = {1,A,a; 3,C,d},

Would select the first instance of "a" in the tree and not the second.

My loss of information was so extensive I had to revert to JabRef 2.10
and recover the group trees from a recent backup.

Haines Brown