Author sorting is inconsistent when there is a Corporate Author [#817474]

Entries with Corporate Authors do not sort consistently. Unless there are special requirements for Corporate Authors this is a simple bug. See biblio.pages.inc around line 362

362 $sortby = "ORDER BY bcd.lastname %s ";
363 $where['bc-rank'] = "bc.rank=0";
364 $where['bc-auth-category'] = "bc.auth_category IN (1,5)";
365 $joins['bc'] = '  INNER JOIN {biblio_contributor} as bc on b.vid = bc.vid ';

This has two odd results when there are both a primary author (category 1) and a Corporate Author (category 5). First there are two entries reported. One is sorted by Corporate Author hence appears in the 'wrong' place in author sorts.

This is easy to reproduce -- just add a corporate author to a test entry and sort by authors.

I changed line 364 to

              $where['bc-auth-category'] = "bc.auth_category IN (1)";

and see the results I expect.

All of which seems a bit simplistic so I'm probably missing something. I described the inconsistent behavior in a bit more detail at
http://siddharthasintent.org/community/node/2596#comment-11075

Cheers
Gordon

Comments

Comment #1

rjerome commented 3 June 2010 at 23:55

Hi Gordon,

I am aware of this issue, I've just not come up with a clean solution yet... Basically, the intention is to select entries which have primary authors (auth_category == 1) ,but substitute "corporate" authors (auth_category == 5) if there are no primary authors listed.

Ron.

Comment #2

rjerome commented 9 June 2010 at 01:57

The real issue here is that each author category has it's own "ranking / author order counter" so what is really needed is a global contributor counter to keep track of the order of authors. This in itself is not a big deal, but I need to craft an update to modify the database table biblio_contributor accordingly.