[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Bugs in marc2bre.pl?

[Dan Wells]

Hello all,

I have been playing around with record loads of various shapes and sizes over the last week or two, and have come to the conclusion that marc2bre.pl is a bit discombobulated in its current state.  It boils down to a consistent state of confusion within the code between the record id (i.e. database id) and the record title control number.  I believe these should generally not be the same thing, and I would say about half of the code agrees with me :)  In particular, the idfield argument seems be the source of most of my problems.  I believe it was originally meant to be a way to specify tcns, not database record ids, but since tcns are often alphanumeric, the regular expression which strips out any non-digits flies in the face of this.  The end result is that there is a bunch of code, particularly in the preprocess subroutine that is supposed to check and intelligently set the tcn but which never gets run under normal circumstances (short of an odd dontuse_file setting).  From what I can tell, there is therefore no good way to get a file out the other end with sane tcns (unless yours happen to be all digits).

I have created a new version which hopefully untangles most of this.  I left in the idfield setting for setting the record database id (though I am not sure how useful this actually is) and added tcnfield and tcnsubfield settings which honor common tcn formats and use the preprocess code properly in case of duplicates.  It is currently being tested, but before I post any version of it.  I am wondering if am completely nuts about all of this.

Thanks,
DW