Integrate Biblio and Footnote modules

Hi Henrik,

I am the Biblio creator, and aside from a few welcomed patches, the sole developer. I have been thinking about how to approach this one. It was one of the biblio users who submitted the filter patch, which is more or less a direct copy of your filter routines which work quite well.

An ideal solution would be to have some sort of "footnote" api, much like nodeapi which would allow other modules to add there own footnote types to the footnote module. If you like I could work toward this end and submit patches to the footnote module to make this work.

Off the top of my head, I could see the footnote module building a list of filters from within and by calling the api to gather footnote filters from other modules.

Let me know what you think of this idea.

Ron.

Hi Henrik,

I've been thinking about this a bit, but I haven't written any code yet. There is one main difference between how footnote works and how it's being used in the biblio module and that is that the text (citekey) enclosed in the <bib>citekey</bib> tags is not actually used in the footnote, but it is used to query the database and gather the information required to build the reference. So for this reason it would seem to me we would also need to register a callback function to be associated with the particular tag or type. You would pass the callback function the text from between the tags and it would return a chunk of html.

Here is the function that biblio is using to generate the reference from the citekey...

function _biblio_citekey_print($citekey){
   $nid = db_fetch_object(db_query("SELECT nid FROM {biblio} WHERE biblio_citekey = '%s' ORDER BY vid DESC", $citekey));
   if ($nid->nid > 0){
     $node = node_load($nid->nid);
     return theme('biblio_short', $node);
   } else {
     return t("Citekey: ").$citekey.t(" not found");
   }
 
}

Also I was thinking that rather than have completely different preg_replace_callback functions for each type (html, textile), could you not just have one and use the match array to determine which was matched. I haven't tried this yet, but I think something like

preg_replace_callback('|<fn>(.*?)</fn>|<bib>(.*?)</bib>|s', '_footnotes_replace_callback', $text) 

would put the fn tags in match[1] and the bib tags in match[2] and thus based on the order you built the preg_expression string you could also determine what type it is and call the appropriate callback to output that type. The advantage of having a single preg_replace_callback function is that the numbering ($n) will be consistent when you mix different types of tags within the same document.

Ron.

Ok, so I had a few spare hours, and I went ahead and coded up a test module. It is all more or less working now, just a little spit and polish required. I added a db table which holds the externally registered tags and callbacks. I also added a function which builds the pattern to match against from the registered tags. It all works from a single preg_replace_callback, so any number of different tags can be used in the same node and the footnote list is numbered sequentially as the tags are found.

I'll post a patch soon so you can try it out.

Ron.

Ahhh, I see what you were getting at now, initially I thought you meant the user would have to enter the reference..., I didn't realize you meant that the biblio module would just convert the tags to fleshed out tags. There is no question this is a MUCH simpler approach, and in my books simpler is usually better (although my callback registration was pretty cool if I do say so myself).

I'll give this a try and let you know how it works.

Ron.

Ok, I added the bib tag converter and it seems to work quite well. If, as you said, you put the bib tag filter before the fn tag filter they are all handled by the footnotes module.

A much easier solution indeed.

Ron.

That is correct, there are not changes required on the footnotes side.

Although on thing you might want to consider is the user who submitted the original footnote patch for the biblio module had added something quite nifty, that being integration with the "hover tips" module, so that when you hover over the reference number in the text, it pops up a little box with the reference information (check it out here... http://p4.sme-ccppd.org/beta.soundandmusiccomputing.org/node/598) just find a reference number in square brackets [4] and hover over it.

It's quite a simple patch, so if you are interested perhaps you could add it to the main footnotes code.

I did put a safeguard in so that if the footnotes module is not enabled, my module reverts to it's original functionality (i.e. it just handles the bib tags by itself), but if it (footnotes) is enabled it does not check the ordering of the filters.

Subscribing.

Is there an easy way to patch the latest 4.7 version so I can get this little input filter?

It's in the latest 4.7 -dev version.

Ron.

I'm having a great time working with the integrated footnotes and biblio modules (using the 4.7 version of footnotes, and the 4.7 dev branch of biblio -- though not the very latest versions). However, I am encountering (what is for my purposes) a major issue. I would like to create footnotes that contain bibliographic references (drawn from biblio), as well as other text. So, for example, I'd like to be able to do this:

<fn>For further details, see <bib>nimrod2004</bib> and <bib>canute1969</bib>. However, note that these authors address the question from very different perspectives.</fn>

or even just this:

<fn>See <bib>nimrod2004</bib> p. 277.</fn>

However, I can't seem to do this. The closing bib tags seem to cause the footnote to "break" -- so any text after the closing bib tag appears in the main text of the node rather than in the footnote. Where there are two bib references in a footnote, as in the first example, the first bit of text will appear in the footnote, as will the first biblio reference, then "and" will appear in the main text, then the second biblio reference will appear in a footnote, and any text following the second closing bib tag will display in the main text again.

What do you think -- is it possible to (and are you willing to ;-) implement this kind of functionality? It would really help me a lot (and make Drupal a stronger platform for scholarly publishing).

Thanks in advance!

(P.S. in case the question comes up, I have made biblio "lighter" in my input format, so it comes before footnotes.)

Hingo is quite correct, what you are attempting to do will create a footnote within a footnote. Off the top of my head, my feeling is that perhaps a new tag type might solve the problem. Maybe to indicate that this is a reference within a footnote?

Ron.

Indeed, a new tag type might be the most straightforward way of dealing with this. But I find myself wondering, given that we have the footnotes module, whether it's even necessary for biblio to generate footnotes at all. The reason I say this is that I wonder how common (or advisable) it is to cite an entire work (the way the biblio module allows) without any commentary. From my perspective, most of the time if you cite an entire work (without indicating specific page numbers), it's better practice to provide some kind of explanatory text in the footnote. If you're simply providing a reference for a quote, it's normal not to provide commentary, but you at least need to include a page number for the quote (which biblio does not currently allow).

So at this stage I'm thinking it may be more logical for the bib tags to simply generate a full reference from a citekey (in any context, not just in a footnote), and to leave footnote handling to the footnotes module. I guess some people might find it annoying to have to nest the tags every time -- but I personally wouldn't have a problem with it.

By the way, I should point out that though biblio isn't designed to be used the way I'm using it, it DOES actually work that way -- but only partially. Since (as far as I can tell) the bib tag functionality and the usage of citekeys isn't really clearly documented, I just tried including the bib tags within a fn-generated footnote and it worked fine (to my delight). Fine, that is, until I tried to add text in the footnote after the closing bib tag.