[Evergreen-reports] [Sales] Publication year average

[Blake Graham-Henderson]

All,

Thanks for your considerate responses. What Mike said is the conclusion 
I had come to, and I was wondering if anyone else needs the publication 
year to be an actual number so that the reporter can do things like 
average,min,max,etc. From the sounds of it, no one is currently using 
the Evergreen reporter to produce such a thing (I don't see how you 
could). I suppose no one is using an external program to make it happen 
(to meet collection reporting needs from the higher-ups)?

I agree with Mike, in that the best place to get the publication year 
(right now) is the Simple Record Extracts, because it hunts it down from 
several places in the bib record. Walking it backwards:

reporter.materialized_simple_record -> reporter.old_super_simple_record 
-> metabib.wide_display_entry -> metabib.compressed_display_entry -> 
metabib.flat_display_entry -> metabib.display_entry

Which is a trigger-created-table based upon the index definition found 
in config.metabib_field

one of those views is hardcoded to expect "pubdate" to exist in the 
metabib_field definitions. Which exists with stock Evergreen 
definitions. Which is:

"//mods33:mods/mods33:originInfo//mods33:dateIssued[@encoding="marc"]|//mods33:mods/mods33:originInfo//mods33:dateIssued[1]"

Decoding that is fun. Suffice it to say: the pubyear can come from 
several places in the record, and I like that better than only looking 
in one place.

So, in conclusion, if a patch were written, I think it would be smart to 
piggy back on this logic. It might be fairly straightforward to get the 
first occurrence from the JSON string and cast it to an integer 
(stripping out non-numeric characters first). That's where my thoughts 
are right now. I don't think we're going to be writing the patch anytime 
soon, just thinking through it with everyone.

If everyone agrees that this is something that Evergreen should have, 
and we agree on the method, I might champion the bug and patch for 
future meetings and releases!

-Blake-
Conducting Magic
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