It's true - in fact authors ("creators", "editors"...) should probably 
point to a separate dataset and you could then use the modal thing I've 
demo'ed.

But! Given how "creators" is hard-coded all over EPrints, you'll need to 
rewrite big chunks of the core for this to work nicely.

I think the compromise solution is to use the "id" bit (so creators_id) 
as a reference to another table. That other table can contain extra data 
that describes the author.

The danger with adding too many sub-fields is that you're creating an 
extra table per sub-field in the DB and as you've noticed, Gilles, this 
won't work on workflow/submission form.

Seb.

On 08/07/14 16:14, John Salter wrote:

I think that something that Seb demoed at the Eprints user group recently might be useful in this scenario...
*if* you had an author dataset, (similar to the 'user' dataset), you could store authors as dataobjrefs.

Seb's demo showed something similar for Projects/Funders - using a pop-up/modal window. It was very nice!

There has been previous discussion around the subject of richer data for authors - but I can’t remember any definite endpoint to those discussions!

Cheers,
John

-----Original Message-----
From: eprints-tech-bounces@ecs.soton.ac.uk [mailto:eprints-tech-bounces@ecs.soton.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Ian Stuart
Sent: 08 July 2014 16:04
To: eprints-tech@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Subject: [EP-tech] Re: About compounds

On 08/07/14 15:54, Gilles Fournié wrote:

Hi,

The library staff wants us to describe authors with many fields
(internal id number, department, unit, ...).

So we wonder if we can add subfields to existing compounds like creators
or editors.
Obviously, we would keep existing subfields unchanged and just add new
subfields.
Is it safe to do so ? Or are there risks to break something ?

Yes, adding extra fields is easy..... but only 1 level deep!

And, as a side question, I fear that a too big compound will be unusable
: in the input form, we will get a table with many columns, which will
probably be larger than the screen width. Is there a way to have the
subfields use several rows ?

I've not seen one.... not without writing your own rendering routines
(which are eminently doable..)

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