Option to keep original author order

Yes, I feel that our chair web pages hit many unusual cases for drupal :-) Be that the breadcrumbs for user generated menus, protecting groups of pages with passwords but without logins or the unusual mixture of single- and dual-languages and submenus .

I have another one for biblio: the author filter should only show the primary authors (those who are working at our chair). But fortunately I'm able to solve this easily with hook_form :-)

Another thought on this: What I want to do currently works fine but only because the rank in _save_contributors is calculated as

      'rank' => $rank[$author['type']]++,

But $author['type'] is not defined in the $authors array passed to _save_contributors and therefore $rank just counts up. So when you have some normal authors and some editors and the editors came last in the edit form, the table looks

+-----+------+-----+-------+------+
| nid | vid  | cid | ct_id | rank |
+-----+------+-----+-------+------+
| 614 | 1056 |  22 |     4 |    0 | 
| 614 | 1056 |  23 |     4 |    1 | 
| 614 | 1056 |  24 |    35 |    2 | 
| 614 | 1056 |   9 |     4 |    3 | 
| 614 | 1056 |  25 |    66 |    4 | 
| 614 | 1056 |  26 |    66 |    5 | 
| 614 | 1056 |  27 |    66 |    6 | 
+-----+------+-----+-------+------+

while I guess the code in _save_contributors is meant to create a table like

+-----+------+-----+-------+------+
| nid | vid  | cid | ct_id | rank |
+-----+------+-----+-------+------+
| 614 | 1056 |  22 |     4 |    0 | 
| 614 | 1056 |  23 |     4 |    1 | 
| 614 | 1056 |  24 |    35 |    0 | 
| 614 | 1056 |   9 |     4 |    2 | 
| 614 | 1056 |  25 |    66 |    0 | 
| 614 | 1056 |  26 |    66 |    1 | 
| 614 | 1056 |  27 |    66 |    2 | 
+-----+------+-----+-------+------+

If that was the case, my patch wouldn't help.

However, I wonder if there is any advantage in restarting the rank for every author type from 0. So if you think about this, please consider if we couldn't change that into just a 'rank' => $rank++ to keep a unique rank value for every author of a node. That would allow to keep the order in which authors were entered while still allowing any sort lik "first by author type, then by rank" as you need them for the other styles.

Could be sth. like

 function _save_contributors($authors, $nid, $vid, $update = FALSE) {
-  $rank = array();
+  if (variable_get('biblio_sort_contributors', 'type') == 'type') 
+    $rank = array();
+  else
+    $rank = 0;
:
:
+    $_rank = is_array($rank) ? $rank[$author['type']]++ : $rank++
     $link_array = array(
       'nid' => $nid,
       'vid' => $vid,
       'cid' => $cid,
-      'rank' => $rank[$author['type']]++,
+      'rank' => $_rank,
       'ct_id' => $author['ct_id']
     );

I think you are right. However, if we have an entry from biblio_contributor with type instead of ct_id, we can't determine the ctdid by just using the biblio_contributor_type table anymore. We need to query the biblio table, too, because we need tid+type to get the ctdid and biblio_contributor only contains the type if you replace the ct_id by type.

I haven't checked the biblio code to see if this situation happens at all, I think it's just sth. to keep in mind. And I guess an additional db query at some point is fine for gaining a easier and better-to-understand data structure.

Just see that this is fixed in 6.x-1.1. Thanks a lot!

Oh, I was a bit too fast. The 1.0 release has changed things in a way that make it absolutely impossible to mix authors of different types. As we have records where a secondary author has a higher rank than a primary author, those records will be changed when loading and saving again. That's not good.

I will have to alter the whole contributor GUI stuff to get the old behaviour back. This is disappointing, I thought things would get better with the new author stuff. But they are less flexible now :-(

This sounds like I missed some GUI functionality when trying around. Let me take another look tomorrow (I'm off work already) and I'll post back what I've found.

Thanks so far for caring!

Ok, I take everything back, I claim the opposite and I apologize :-)

In fact, the new GUI hasn't restricted but extended flexibility in a way that I was just too stupid to catch it :-) Due to the way of upgrade of our existing records into the new release I didn't realize it was possible to have two types share the same contributor fieldset. Now I must way: WOW! This is really cool! It allows every kind of trick that we had so far patched into biblio or implemented with our hooks. Even the "secondary = editor" is no longer a problem. We have the "Author" fieldset sharing our three non-editor author types, and the "Secondary author" fieldset for the editor types, so everything with bibtex import/export and editors works fine without any additional stuff.

You really solved all this in a very elegant way and I'm sorry I was moaning around instead of realizing the new possibilities :-)

I see :-(