okfn/bibserver — Issue #131: Bibjson round trip alters records in another persons collection
Author: markmacgillivray
Created: 2011-11-18 11:30:14+00:00
State: open

Not exactly an error as I knew it would do this, but it now brings up the point of how to manage records across collections.

The importer checks to see if a record has a collection key, and if so it points to a list of parent collections. But, if someone copies the entire collection as bibjson then uploads them all again into their own collection, this results in the records already having a collection name, and also the new collection name being added. but then, the old records are deleted because an upload can be a refresh. This leaves the original collection also pointing to the new records, which now have two collections in their collection list.

We could solve this by not deleting records, and only performing updates to individual changed records when refreshing a collection. But this will require a way of identifying the difference between a refresh action and a new collection action.