refdb-users — List for RefDB users

Re: [Refdb-users] Survey: most wanted features in a web interface

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

Jus...@Pi... writes:
 > My greatest worry is simple batch entry of bibliographic data for
 > people totally ignorant of RefDB and its functioning. For this the
 > following would be highly desirable:
 > 
 > - server-side conversion of the most important bib data formats (so
 >   people can directly upload their BibTeX files),
 > 

I've extended the "Upload from file" dialog accordingly. The PHP
interface now determines at runtime which converters are available,
and displays a list of these supported formats. This includes those
formats that require bibutils. I've posted an updated screenshot at

http://refdb.sourceforge.net/preview/php-add-file.png

A few minor problems remain to be solved. E.g. we can't auto-detect
the tagged EndNote RIS export as it resembles "real" RIS but has a
couple of bugs which are not necessarily detectable in each
dataset. It will be imported as RIS, warts and all. Also, I haven't
found the header structure of binary UKMARC datasets to see whether we
can tell them apart from the other MARC variants (if anyone uses this
format at all, that is). Finally, I'd like to see a sample of
EndNote's XML export, if someone has one handy. I'd like to see how to
auto-detect this format.

regards,
Markus

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Re: [Refdb-users] Screenshots of new PHP web interface

[Bruce D'A. <bda...@gm...>]

On 10/24/07, Markus Hoenicka <mar...@mh...> wrote:
> Quoting Bruce D'Arcus <bda...@gm...>:
>
> > One comment is the "simple search" is not simple. Compare to, say,
> > Google, or for reference management, Zotero, where there is a single
> > field. I would think ideally "simple search" would be integrated into
> > a main table view, and perhaps do updating using Ajax.
>
> I haven't found a word on the zotero web page how their simple search
> works. Do you have any insight? If it is just about searching a string
> in all relevant fields ...

Yes, that's the case. The included fields include user notes, for example.

Bruce

Re: [Refdb-users] Screenshots of new PHP web interface

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

Quoting Bruce D'Arcus <bda...@gm...>:

> One comment is the "simple search" is not simple. Compare to, say,
> Google, or for reference management, Zotero, where there is a single
> field. I would think ideally "simple search" would be integrated into
> a main table view, and perhaps do updating using Ajax.
>

I haven't found a word on the zotero web page how their simple search  
works. Do you have any insight? If it is just about searching a string  
in all relevant fields this could be added for sure.

regards,
Markus


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Re: [Refdb-users] Screenshots of new PHP web interface

[Bruce D'A. <bda...@gm...>]

On 10/23/07, Markus Hoenicka <mar...@mh...> wrote:

> Comments and suggestions are very welcome.

One comment is the "simple search" is not simple. Compare to, say,
Google, or for reference management, Zotero, where there is a single
field. I would think ideally "simple search" would be integrated into
a main table view, and perhaps do updating using Ajax.

Bruce

Re: [Refdb-users] Screenshots of new PHP web interface

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

Quoting St=E9phane T=E9letch=E9a <ste...@jo...>:

> On the main search page, i would like to see something closer to a
> citation match (author, journal, year, page number, the later is
> missing).
>

So we'd have to add a volume and a start page search box. Maybe we can =20
even rearrange the boxes a little to make journal article searching =20
more intuitive.

> I'm not usre if you index it or not, but getting a DOi field would be
> very nice since those are more and more common those days.

DOIs are stored in 0.9.9, so a DOI search box is easy to add as well.

>
> I reaaly need to go back to packaging in order to provide the latest
> version (there are some splits for perl module iirc).
>

There is also a SRU interface in 0.9.9 which I'd love to see packaged :-)

regards,
Markus

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[Refdb-users] Screenshots of new PHP web interface

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

Hi,

finally something to drool over :-) As suggested earlier today, here
are some screenshots of the current svn version of the PHP web
interface (most of what you see here is also in pre6, sans a few
bugfixes):

http://refdb.sourceforge.net/preview/

Comments and suggestions are very welcome.

regards,
Markus

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Re: [Refdb-users] Survey: most wanted features in a web interface

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

Hi,

Quoting Jus...@Pi...:

> My greatest worry is simple batch entry of bibliographic data for
> people totally ignorant of RefDB and its functioning. For this the
> following would be highly desirable:
>
> - server-side conversion of the most important bib data formats (so
>   people can directly upload their BibTeX files),
>

This is currently implemented for ISI files (besides the native =20
formats RIS and risx), but the same trick should work for all other =20
data formats that we have converters for. If you include bibutils, we =20
could import quite a few this way, including BibTeX. I'll look into =20
this.

> - after import, display of the imported bib data in editable forms so
>   the user sees what the import procedure made of it, and can directly
>   make corrections.
>

Currently there are two different ways to handle this. If you add or =20
edit a single dataset using the web form, the resulting dataset is =20
displayed in RIS format (but before it is sent to refdbd, so this =20
might require a change) along with a link to the dataset. If you =20
upload data from a local file, you may have several entries per file. =20
Therefore the web interface displays a list of the added datasets with =20
links pointing to these entries. In all cases, following the link will =20
allow you to edit them. The upcoming screenshots will probably make =20
this procedure a little clearer. I'm open to suggestions on how to =20
improve on this.

regards,
Markus

--=20
Markus Hoenicka
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http://www.mhoenicka.de

Re: [Refdb-users] Survey: most wanted features in a web interface

[<Jus...@Pi...>]

Markus -

Great to see that there is significant progress on this front!

My greatest worry is simple batch entry of bibliographic data for
people totally ignorant of RefDB and its functioning. For this the
following would be highly desirable:

- server-side conversion of the most important bib data formats (so
  people can directly upload their BibTeX files),

- after import, display of the imported bib data in editable forms so
  the user sees what the import procedure made of it, and can directly
  make corrections.

Thanks,
Justus

Re: [Refdb-users] Survey: most wanted features in a web interface

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

Quoting Dan O'Donnell <dan...@ul...>:

> Sorry one more thing. Should we post screenshots of the new interface so
> people can see what you mean?
>

Good point. I've already started to prepare a few for the  
to-be-updated RefDB homepage. I could post these and shoot a few more  
to demonstrate the current capabilities. But feel free to beat me at  
it if you get round to it, as I won't be able to do it within the next  
12h or so.

regards,
Markus


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Re: [Refdb-users] Survey: most wanted features in a web interface

[Dan O'D. <dan...@ul...>]

Sorry one more thing. Should we post screenshots of the new interface so
people can see what you mean?

-dan

On Tue, 2007-23-10 at 00:54 +0200, Markus Hoenicka wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> we're about to finish 0.9.9, and a completely rewritten PHP web
> interface will be one of its highlights. Below is a list of the
> current features. Please feel free to send in your comments and
> suggestions for additional features. If time permits, we'll check if
> anything else is eligible for inclusion into 0.9.9.
> 
> - simple search: search by author name, publication year, title,
>   journal, or keyword
> 
> - advanced query: use booleans and several match types to build
>   complex queries
> 
> - the search results are displayed with author names, periodicals, and
>   keywords as "live links" which run appropriate queries to retrieve
>   all datasets containing the given names/periodicals/keywords
> 
> - buttons to edit, delete, or display entries in various formats
> 
> - search indices (keywords, authors, journal names).
> 
> - the search results are again live links that run queries to display
>   matching datasets
> 
> - add references through a web form. Selecting the reference type
>   will provide appropriate field names and descriptions to simplify
>   data entry
> 
> - add reference from a local file
> 
> - in all cases, the addref/updateref (see edit entries above) results
>   are displayed as a list of links to the appropriate entries.
> 
> - the "External databases" feature requires some more documentation,
>   but it apparently allows to run queries in online databases via YAZ.
> 
> - switching databases is possible from every page via a drop-down box
> 
> 
> Once again, please do not hesitate to ask for additional features,
> improvements, or extensions if you feel they are suitable for an
> easy-to-use web interface.
> 
> regards,
> Markus
> 
-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative <http://www.tei-c.org/>
Director, Digital Medievalist Project <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>
Associate Professor and Chair of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Vox: +1 403 329 2378
Fax: +1 403 382-7191
Homepage: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/

Re: [Refdb-users] Survey: most wanted features in a web interface

[Dan O'D. <dan...@ul...>]

On Tue, 2007-23-10 at 00:54 +0200, Markus Hoenicka wrote:
> Hi all,
> 

> - the "External databases" feature requires some more documentation,
>   but it apparently allows to run queries in online databases via YAZ.
> 

Yes on both counts. It is still rudimentary, but if you have the latest
version of Yaz installed, it partially integrates it into refdb. A
desideratum is to get it so you can directly import entries from the
external databases--e.g. a marcxml2risx transformation which feeds to
the add/edit entry form.

This is high on my list, though I've not thoroughly gone through the
object-oriented innards of how the php interface connects with refdb.

> - switching databases is possible from every page via a drop-down box
> 
> 
> Once again, please do not hesitate to ask for additional features,
> improvements, or extensions if you feel they are suitable for an
> easy-to-use web interface.
> 
> regards,
> Markus
> 
-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative <http://www.tei-c.org/>
Director, Digital Medievalist Project <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>
Associate Professor and Chair of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Vox: +1 403 329 2378
Fax: +1 403 382-7191
Homepage: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/

[Refdb-users] Survey: most wanted features in a web interface

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

Hi all,

we're about to finish 0.9.9, and a completely rewritten PHP web
interface will be one of its highlights. Below is a list of the
current features. Please feel free to send in your comments and
suggestions for additional features. If time permits, we'll check if
anything else is eligible for inclusion into 0.9.9.

- simple search: search by author name, publication year, title,
  journal, or keyword

- advanced query: use booleans and several match types to build
  complex queries

- the search results are displayed with author names, periodicals, and
  keywords as "live links" which run appropriate queries to retrieve
  all datasets containing the given names/periodicals/keywords

- buttons to edit, delete, or display entries in various formats

- search indices (keywords, authors, journal names).

- the search results are again live links that run queries to display
  matching datasets

- add references through a web form. Selecting the reference type
  will provide appropriate field names and descriptions to simplify
  data entry

- add reference from a local file

- in all cases, the addref/updateref (see edit entries above) results
  are displayed as a list of links to the appropriate entries.

- the "External databases" feature requires some more documentation,
  but it apparently allows to run queries in online databases via YAZ.

- switching databases is possible from every page via a drop-down box


Once again, please do not hesitate to ask for additional features,
improvements, or extensions if you feel they are suitable for an
easy-to-use web interface.

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de

Re: [Refdb-users] Compiling pre6 - can't find libncurses

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

Quoting Jeremy Malcolm <ter...@gl...>:


> configure:3791: checking for tputs in -lcurses
> configure:3821: gcc -o conftest -I/sw/include -I/sw/include/dbi -O2  =20
>  -L/sw/lib -L/sw/lib/ncurses conftest.c -lcurses   >&5
> /usr/bin/ld: warning /sw/lib/libcurses.dylib cputype (18,  =20
> architecture ppc) does not match cputype (7) for specified -arch  =20
> flag: i386 (file not loaded)
> /usr/bin/ld: Undefined symbols:
> _tputs
> collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

I'm no Mac expert but this error message apparently tries to tell you =20
that the libncurses library that is first in your path is a library =20
built for ppc, not for i386 (you new Mac apparently is one of these =20
Intel Macs). You may have accidentally installed a wrong package. As =20
your original post indicated you have several libncurses libraries =20
around, could you try and remove the offending one and see whether one =20
of the others works?

regards,
Markus



--=20
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mar...@ca...
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http://www.mhoenicka.de

Re: [Refdb-users] Compiling pre6 - can't find libncurses

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

Quoting Jeremy Malcolm <Je...@Ma...>:

>> CFLAGS="-I/sw/include" and LDFLAGS="-L/sw/lib -L/sw/lib/ncurses"
>
> No, I did that already. :-(
>

Too bad. What does config.log say to its excuse?

regards,
Markus

-- 
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http://www.mhoenicka.de

Re: [Refdb-users] Compiling pre6 - can't find libncurses

[Jeremy M. <Je...@Ma...>]

On 22/10/2007, at 3:04 PM, Markus Hoenicka wrote:

> Configure tries to find libncurses.a which it can't find as it hides
> in a subdirectory of /sw/lib. Does it work if you use:
>
> CFLAGS="-I/sw/include" and LDFLAGS="-L/sw/lib -L/sw/lib/ncurses"

No, I did that already. :-(

-- 
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Internet and Open Source lawyer, IT consultant, actor
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Re: [Refdb-users] Compiling pre6 - can't find libncurses

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

Quoting Jeremy Malcolm <Je...@Ma...>:

> Hello,
>
> I've just upgraded my Mac and am trying to compile the latest pre-
> release.  I now have Mac OS 10.4 on an Intel Core Duo architecture.
>

Congrats! Your 1000+ entry bibliographies should now run quite a bit faster.

> Even after exporting CFLAGS=3D"-I/sw/include" and LDFLAGS=3D"-L/sw/lib",
> I get this message when configuring:
>

> /sw/lib/libncurses.5.dylib
> /sw/lib/libncurses.dylib
> /sw/lib/libncurses.dylib.5
> /sw/lib/ncurses/libncurses++.a
> /sw/lib/ncurses/libncurses.5.dylib
> /sw/lib/ncurses/libncurses.a
> /sw/lib/ncurses/libncurses.dylib
> /sw/lib/ncurses/libncurses_g.a
> /usr/lib/libncurses.5.4.dylib
> /usr/lib/libncurses.5.dylib
> /usr/lib/libncurses.dylib
>
> Is this a configure bug?
>

Configure tries to find libncurses.a which it can't find as it hides =20
in a subdirectory of /sw/lib. Does it work if you use:

CFLAGS=3D"-I/sw/include" and LDFLAGS=3D"-L/sw/lib -L/sw/lib/ncurses"

regards,
Markus

--=20
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mar...@ca...
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http://www.mhoenicka.de

[Refdb-users] Compiling pre6 - can't find libncurses

[Jeremy M. <Je...@Ma...>]

Hello,

I've just upgraded my Mac and am trying to compile the latest pre-
release.  I now have Mac OS 10.4 on an Intel Core Duo architecture.

Even after exporting CFLAGS="-I/sw/include" and LDFLAGS="-L/sw/lib",
I get this message when configuring:

checking for tputs in -ltermcap... no
checking for tputs in -lncurses... no
checking for tputs in -lcurses... no
Cannot build refdb without either libtermcap, libncurses, or libcurses

However I do have at least libncurses installed as fink says so and  
"locate libncurses" includes these lines:

/sw/lib/libncurses.5.dylib
/sw/lib/libncurses.dylib
/sw/lib/libncurses.dylib.5
/sw/lib/ncurses/libncurses++.a
/sw/lib/ncurses/libncurses.5.dylib
/sw/lib/ncurses/libncurses.a
/sw/lib/ncurses/libncurses.dylib
/sw/lib/ncurses/libncurses_g.a
/usr/lib/libncurses.5.4.dylib
/usr/lib/libncurses.5.dylib
/usr/lib/libncurses.dylib

Is this a configure bug?

-- 
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Internet and Open Source lawyer, IT consultant, actor
host -t NAPTR 1.0.8.0.3.1.2.9.8.1.6.e164.org|awk -F! '{print $3}'

[Refdb-users] ANN: refdb-0.9.9-pre6 available for testing

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

Hi,

I've uploaded yet another prerelease for the upcoming 0.9.9
release. If you have some time on your hands, please grab the tarball
here:

http://refdb.sourceforge.net/pre/refdb-latest.tar.gz

The focus of this prerelease is the new PHP web interface which
required some additional polish compared to the previous
prerelease. There were also some fixes required in the clients and in
refdbd to make everything work as smoothly as possible. The full list
of changes is attached below. I'd greatly appreciate your feedback on
the web interface. I'd like to get this right when we ship it with
0.9.9, so feel free to throw your weirdest data at it.

regards,
Markus

Bugfixes:

- a bug in the tokenizers used by refdbd and by the clients to parse
  command line arguments has been fixed. Now escaped characters should
  be treated as such in all cases.

Improvements:

- the handling of the AV field has been cleaned up. As of this
  version, the AV field should only contain a physical location,
  i.e. either a description of the location, or a call number. The
  formerly applied PATH: kludge to manage links to local copies of PDF
  files is no longer supported. To store user-specific locations of
  PDF files, use the L1-L4 fields and start the URL with the "file://"
  protocol prefix. These links are assumed to point to local copies
  owned by the user. If the URL uses a relative path, i.e.
    "file://offprints/Miller2002"
  instead of
    "file:///home/markus/offprints/Miller2002"
  (note the additional root slash in the latter URL), the same pdfroot
  mangling is applied as was previously to the AV  - PATH: paths.
  Please see the UPGRADING file for some hints how to efficiently
  migrate existing AV field contents.

- in order to reflect the above change in risx datasets, the risx dtd
  was adapted accordingly. The <link> element is now also allowed in
  <libinfo>. Although the DTD can't enforce this, the pubinfo/link
  elements are supposed to hold publicly accessible URLs of offprints,
  images and such, whereas the libinfo/link elements should receive
  only user-specific local paths to offprints.

- if a character encoding conversion is necessary during data import
  or data export, refdbd now uses the transliteration facility of iconv
  for characters which cannot be mapped to the target encoding, a
  problem which often arises when exporting UTF-8 data to European
  encodings.

- the new PHP web interface was thoroughly overhauled to cope with
  whitespace, apostrophes, and regular expression characters in
  keywords, author names, and journal names. Adding references now works
  from risx data too, and the feedback about the success of adding a
  file has been improved. Adding data from the web form was improved too
  in that empty fields are left out, author name and keyword lists are
  appropriately tokenized, and addref or updateref is used whenever
  appropriate. The code now makes sure to use a unique temporary filename
  which is deleted again afterwards, avoiding clutter in your /tmp. The
  field descriptions of the Add reference form was overhauled too to better
  reflect the contents depending on which reference type is used. The month
  selector now creates a numeric month to comply with the RIS format's
  requirements.


-- 
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Re: [Refdb-users] med2ris failure

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

Quoting Markus Hoenicka <mar...@mh...>:

> <MedlineCitation Owner="NLM" Status="MEDLINE">
>
> vs.
>
> <MedlineCitation Owner Status>
>

This problem seems to be fixed now (Mon Oct 15 10:44:42 UTC 2007). I'm  
still waiting for the other stuff to be fixed.

BTW if you can live without proper umlauts and such, you can of course  
use the MEDLINE format instead of the XML format for the time being.  
This format appears to be ok for now. Just remember to use med2ris -T  
tag to convert the tagged format.

regards,
Markus

-- 
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Re: [Refdb-users] med2ris failure

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

Hi Bruce,

Quoting Bruce Hayward <b.h...@le...>:

> Recently I've been getting lots of failures when I try to convert a
> Pubmed xml file to ris format.

I can feel your pain, brother :-( This time it's not me but Pubmed who =20
screwed up things. They have introduced a couple of changes lately =20
which create invalid XML.

> junk after document element at line 216, column 4, byte 11204 at
> /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach/XML/Parser.pm line 187
>
> In this case the ris file contains only the first reference

This is because the XML file contains consecutive top-level =20
PubmedArticle elements. In a valid XML file these should be wrapped in =20
a PubmedArticleSet element as they used to be until a few weeks ago. A =20
workaround is to request the datasets individually.

> not well-formed (invalid token) at line 3, column 27, byte 44 at
> /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach/XML/Parser.pm line 187
>
> In this case the ris file is empty.

This is because Pubmed no longer correctly exports attribute values. =20
Compare the second element of a valid (until mid last week) and a =20
recent entry:

<MedlineCitation Owner=3D"NLM" Status=3D"MEDLINE">

vs.

<MedlineCitation Owner Status>

This again is invalid XML which the expat parser used by med2ris =20
rightfully barfs at.

One workaround is to copy the pretty-printed version (which happens to =20
be valid) to your editor and save that to a file, instead of using the =20
built-in "File" or "Text" tools in the drop-down box of the Pubmed =20
interface.

I have encountered additional XML problems in the last week or so. =20
E.g. the author name "O'Brien" is no longer exported as is, but as =20
"O&apos;Brien" which again is invalid XML as the non-standard entity =20
isn't declared anywhere.

I've complained at the help desk about the latter two issues (I didn't =20
know about the first one yet), and they told me they were working at a =20
fix. But I think it won't hurt if you go ahead and contact them as =20
well to tighten the thumb screws a bit further.

regards,
Markus

--=20
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http://www.mhoenicka.de

[Refdb-users] med2ris failure

[Bruce H. <b.h...@le...>]

Recently I've been getting lots of failures when I try to convert a 
Pubmed xml file to ris format.
I've attached a couple of offending files.

Failure 1:

med2ris pubmed_031007.xml > pubmed_031007.ris

junk after document element at line 216, column 4, byte 11204 at 
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach/XML/Parser.pm line 187

In this case the ris file contains only the first reference


Failure 2:

med2ris pubmed_081007.xml > pubmed_081007.ris

not well-formed (invalid token) at line 3, column 27, byte 44 at 
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach/XML/Parser.pm line 187

In this case the ris file is empty.

[Refdb-users] ANN: refdb-0.9.9-pre5 available for download

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

Hi all,

there is a new prerelease available at:

http://refdb.sourceforge.net/pre/refdb-latest.tar.gz

The list of changes compared to pre4 is fairly short, but the changes
are no less important. In fact, they may be key reasons for an upgrade
to 0.9.9! There are three changes which I'd like to point out:

1) as announced previously, the PHP web interface has been ripped out
   and replaced by a new implementation from scratch (thanks again to
   Dan O'Donnell and Dominik Reusser). The new interface is better and
   looks better, and leaves room for future extensions.

2) namespace support has been added to both the results returned by
   getref and the bibliographies. This allows, for the first time, to
   use RefDB in conjunction with schema-based DocBook V5 and TEI P5
   documents. It also allows to use the getref output in any other
   namespaced document.

3) raw bibliographies are now supported. This allows you to use RefDB
   as a reference data source without applying the style
   information. The output should be processed with the default
   DocBook or TEI stylesheets.

I'd appreciate if anyone working with schema-based documents could
have a look at the output generated by this prerelease. There may be a
few rough edges left which I'd like to fix before doing a new
release. Also, I'd appreciate your comments on the new PHP
interface. Comments and suggestions are more than welcome.

regards,
Markus
 
-- 
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de

[Refdb-users] PHP interface reloaded

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

Hi all,

thanks to the efforts of Dan and Dominik there is a revamped PHP
interface in the svn repository. After importing their work, I've made
a few changes:

- I've replaced the exec() calls with calls to a new object-oriented
  RefDB client library. The latter is currently just a wrapper around
  the appropriate shell commands that call the C clients, but it can
  be replaced at a later time with a version using direct socket
  communication with refdbd without having to alter the calls (except
  for the constructor).

- I've also fixed the code that tests for a RIS file. The check now
  skips leading empty lines, as per the "spec" each RIS dataset starts
  with a newline - even at the start of a file.

I've managed to search, edit, and add datasets without a hitch. I
still see a few rough edges though, so I'd like to ask everyone to get
out their PHP skills and have a look at the code. To simplify testing
I'll try to finish a prerelease on the weekend, including a first shot
at the documentation of the PHP interface.

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de

Re: [Refdb-users] web interface?

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

Hi,

are you still alive=3F It's been a long time but it seems like you
developed a PHP frontend for RefDB about two years ago. We've just
swapped our existing PHP frontend for a new one written from
scratch. Unfortunately it uses lots of exec() calls to call the
clients instead of talking directly to refdbd.

Do you still have your code handy=3F Would you mind sharing it so we
could extract the bits and pieces that implement the client/server
dialog=3F

best regards,
Markus

Olivier M=E9doc writes:
 >=20
 > Dear refdb users,=20
 >=20
 > After several months I try to use the summer to finalise our instala=
tion
 > of refdb and the only thing missing is now a web user interface. I s=
aw
 > two projects (one on sourceforge) which looks promising, but is ther=
e
 > still some activity =3F (I must confess that I did not read all the
 > messages of the list in the past months...).
 >=20
 >=20
 > Now that I have some time (Holidays ), I'm Rewriting RefDBWeb with t=
he Php.MVC framework. I'll be easier to add features to the web interfa=
ce and to add third party work. And maybe it'll be easier to understand=
 the code =3F Php.MVC is a Strut like implementation of the MVC pattern=
=2E
 >=20
 > =09=09

--=20
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de

Re: [Refdb-users] ANN: refdb-0.9.9-pre4 available for testing

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

Quoting Markus Hoenicka <mar...@mh...>:

> Hi again,
>
> this is to announce another prerelease which is available right here:
>

Well, 'twas 4am, so I forgot to mention the upgrading information. Here goes=
.

If you run 0.9.8, refdbd -a should be able to upgrade the main =20
database for you. See the manual or the man page for further details. =20
If you run one of the 0.9.9 prereleases, please drop the existing main =20
database (refdb) and have refdbd -a create a new one (or create it =20
manually as per the manual). Make sure to export any custom styles =20
before upgrading, unless you have the XML sources handy anyway.

If you run 0.9.8, 0.9.9-pre1, or 0.9.9-pre2, you need to export your =20
reference data, drop the reference database, upgrade, create a new =20
reference database, and add your data again. If you already had =20
0.9.9-pre3 running, existing reference databases are supposed to be ok.

regards,
Markus



--=20
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de