[Refdb-devel] jEdit interface to RefDB

[Markus H. <mar...@mh...>]

Damien Jade Duff writes:
 > I am planning to make some improvements to my basic jEdit RefDB 
 > interface and since maybe one day this might be useful to someone else, 
 > I think I'm justified in seeing if anyone wants to comment before I get 
 > up to my armpits in the technical details of java GUI building. If 
 > you're interested in jEdit GUIs for RefDB, read on.
 > 

First of all, any attempts at a graphical interface to RefDB are
greatly appreciated. I know that not everyone is fond enough of Emacs
(or vim) to use the existing interfaces.

 > Incidentally, in order to create links directly between xnotes at 
 > present I would have to create dummy references for these to point to. 
 > Is this sensible, or am I trying to push the system too far?  (i.e. as 
 > well as keeping a bibliography I want to use the system to keep notes 
 > and it seems nearly adapted to this in structure). Whaddya reckon?
 > 

You mean linking notes to notes? I'd have to check whether this could
be supported natively.

 > The former has the advantage that it doesn't stretch jEdit's memory and 
 > is has a reasonably straightforward partial-synchronisation strategy. 
 > But it means that I need to impose more structure on my reference 
 > database so that I can browse it in a local fashion. refdbc does provide 
 > a facility for extracting the author list, keyword list, journal list, 
 > etc though unfortunately there is no facility for an anadorned list of 
 > citation keys or note keys (I could probably figure how to do this even 
 > though c gives me a headache, but perhaps it could be included in the 
 > next release...? Also, presumably titles are not indexed fields). I 
 > _think_ refdb should be fast enough if I choose my methods of data 
 > extraction right.
 > 

I could add functions that retrieve lists for citation keys, notes
keys, and essentially any other field that you may be interested
in. It will make the interface a bit clumsier though, as there will be
a variety of fairly specialized commands that are of no interest to
the regular command line user.

One thing that I've always been pondering is server-side paging. I
don't know whether you had something similar in mind, but I feel
refdbd should be able to return the results of queries in chunks of an
arbitrary size. This way, a graphical app could request e.g. the
results 11-20 of a query without having to cache the remaining 5000
hits. This should be doable as long as SQL supports this (I think it
does).

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
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