The main window’s table does not seem to include inherited data from the parent entry. It would be very useful if the table could show and use the inherited data. It would be useful for example for sorting entries by year correctly. Right now, when viewing an entry that inherits value per cross ref, I have often to perform several mouse movements to get to the inherited data.
Please vote if you support this proposal:
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Hi i_ngli,
can you elaborate a bit? There is no inheritance mechanism in bibtex, so I do not really get what you mean. Can you provide an example?
sorry, not for being more explicit before. consider the case in the screenshot.
whilst the preview for #3 uses crossref’ed data (e.g. the year from #1), the table does not show the year for #3.
This means, when I sort all the entries according to year, then the crossref’ing entries do not show up along the entries of the respective year, but sorted together with all the other entries that do not have a year field.
now, i used the notion “inherited” to point to the mechanism of drawing data from the crossref’ed entry (#1).
Thanks, I think I get what you mean. This does indeed not work at the moment, as entries are displayed strictly based on the content of an entry alone. So if the book chapter does not have a separate year field, there will nothing be displayed.
It might be a worthwhile feature to implement, though!
It is actually a one-liner. There is a method BibDatabase.getResolvedField(fieldName, bibEntry, database) that can be used to get “resolved” information for a field. I think it also resolves strings. May be a performance issue for large databases but should be quite easy to test.
If things work out there will be a version to test in five minutes or so at http://builds.jabref.org/resolvedfieldsinmaintable
This is a very quick hack (although it is simple), but there may be cases which I haven’t thought of. One obvious one is probably that the field aliasing is not working at the moment. Still it would be interesting to see if it is reasonable performance-wise for people with large databases with many crossrefs and strings.
Thanks a lot for your efforts! I tested the version for a few minutes and am very satisfied so far. Will report if I see issues emerging.
This feature has been implemented and is now available in JabRef since version 3.7.
