Support

Hi Sakis,

We're just about ready to go live in a couple of weeks with the Digital Library website that I'm using JFilters on... have contacted you about it before.

Well of course the client has just noticed an odd glitch with the Filters module in that it's not picking up a particular couple of authors in the results for the Author field.

The author names in question are "Gillard" and "Switserloot", and their articles are on the same page, as you can see in the attached screenshot - the url for this page is:

https://livedexperiencedigitallibrary.snaffleweb.com.au/browse-library/co-design-and-co-production/case-studies-research?start=5

So they are displaying on the category blog output but not showing in the Filter search - screenshot attached - though other authors from the same titles do. You can test this yourself here:

https://livedexperiencedigitallibrary.snaffleweb.com.au/search-library

At first I thought it might be because the name is coming after the ampersand and at the end, but I've done tests on other names which follow one that are at the end, and they've come up fine, so I'm a bit lost as to why they are not working.

Any ideas why they're not showing as results?

Have included admin details if you'd like to have a look at the backend.

https://livedexperiencedigitallibrary.snaffleweb.com.au/administrator/
login: snaffle-admin
password: 5R25t3#5$bx68t^t

Thanks

Nathan

Sorry, forgot the screenshots... attached here.

Hi Sakis,

Thanks for the response and that information, have updated to the latest version and enabled the scrollbars.

I've updated the length of the labels though there seems to be a built-in limit of 120 characters maximum?

It seems to be working ok now but I wouldn't be surprised if in futre we have a larger list of authors, so wondering if there's a way of increasing it beyond 120?

I also noticed that increasing the limit increases the width of the dropdown container... would there be any problems with me constraining that with CSS?

Btw. Why not using the subform field to enter each author as a separate record in each article, instead of inserting them all together in 1 field?

To be honest, probably because I've not used the subform field before, so didn't really know what it can do, so I'll do some reading up on it.

In this case, the Authors formatting has to be in this particular reference format and the person who was publishing the content was able to copy and paste the Authors in to the field, so if they'd been broken up individually, it would have been a more time consuming exercise... then there would be the issue of having them display on the front end in the correct format.

What would be the benefits of using a subform in this case?

Thanks

Nathan

Hi Sakis,

Apologies for the slow reply, I'm a little overloaded at the moment.

Btw. Having longer values than 120 chars is not recommended as will be pretty much useless to your users.

I'm afraid I don't really know what you mean by this. The example I provided to you is 124 characters long, so I can see that the intial at the end has been cut off.

But if I'm able to enter more than 120 characters in a label field, how is that "useless to my users"?  ... it seems more useless that I can't search on them.

Also it would provide your users a way to filter by an author who participates in other publications with different co-authors.

I don't quite understand this either... with the current setup, searching for a particular author already displays any publication they've participated in, including with other authors - screenshot attached.

If you wish to use the subform custom field and automatically set it's values from your "Resource Author" custom field, we can possibly develop a php to do that automatically. Also you can keep this as a cron job for the site's admins.

I'm open to this idea if there's a clear benefit but I have some additional questions...

I assume that there would be extra cost involved in the development of the Cron script? That's not a problem as such, but an idea of cost would be good.

There's also the small issue that I would have to redo the frontend layout of each entry which is currently using the Yootheme Builder and the Sub-Form layout to display all of the fields.

Would I have to individually map each of the Sub-Form fields to recreate the Author field? Or I could still just map the main Author field for front end display?

And lastly, for the front end search function, would the subform entries display like they do now, or would it just be each individual author listed in the drop down?

Sorry for the mutiple questions.

Thanks

Nathan

Hi Sakis,

Thanks for the explanation, I understand the benefits of the subform field now.

The 80 EUR for the script is fine as such, but I think we might need to do this as a stage 2 for this project as it's a little over budget already and I'll have to speak with the client about the extra spend.

It's not so much the script cost but I suspect the front end is going to take a little bit of re-working to implement.

The other problem is that we are planning to go live with it next week so this work would delay that.

Finally, I do also need to check with the client as to whether they want this change in how the Author search works.

While I understand that the change will bring up multiple publications by the same author, the people using this website aren't "regular users", they are academics working in this field who are used to very long labels that they will indeed read to the end, so I have to make sure that they don't actually prefer it the way it is now.

I'll be meeting with the client in the next couple of days for what's meant to be a "final review", so I'll discuss it with them then and get back to you.

Thanks for all of the information and for thinking about the solution for me - appreciate it.

Kind Regards

Nathan