Sonny Software

Hi all,

I am looking for a little bit of help with the Bookends server. What I am trying to do is make my paper library (search for references and access PDFs) accessible to members of my lab. I've gotten the Server to work and display search results in the right format, including the generation of hyperlinks to attached files. My problem is that many of my references have complex Keywords fields, such that imported refs not only have the link to the attached file (denoted with •) but also Pubmed keywords. Bookends seems to be OK with this -- it finds my attached files seamlessly from within the program. When I try to link to this field using the web server and the instructions in the user guide, the link to the name of the file contains the entire contents of the Keyword field. These links don't work correctly, obviously. I've thought of a two different ways around this issue, but am having trouble making either work:

1) Mirror the attached file names to a dedicated field that is otherwise unused and use this to generate the links for file download. I can't figure out how to copy only a selection of text within a field to another field, though.
2) Strip the pubmed keyword contents so that only the attached file names remain. Continue to use the keyword field to generate the links for file download.

I could do (2) manually, but since my bibliography is always growing, I'd like to solve the problem programatically if possible.

Has anyone else had this problem and come up with a good solution? Thanks in advance,

dave

My initial suggestion is to either ignore PubMed keywords when you import (they are pretty useless for personal databases), or have Bookends import them to User1 (or some other user-defined field).

Jon
Sonny Software

Hi Jon,

Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure that your suggestion would be ideal since I already have 1000+ references in my database, with 200+ of those having linked PDFs. I guess that I could export, do some sort of text cleanup with regexps, and then reimport -- does Bookends simply use the • character to identify linked files or is there something else embedded in each record? In other words, if I were to export and then reimport, would the linked file information be lost in the process?

Thanks,

dave[/quote]

doconnor wrote:does Bookends simply use the • character to identify linked files or is there something else embedded in each record? In other words, if I were to export and then reimport, would the linked file information be lost in the process?

Hi,

Yes, that's all that Bookends uses to identify an attachment. It also keeps aliases of the folders these files may be in, but the • denotes the name of a linked file. So if you export/import, Bookends will still recognize it as an attachment.

Jon
Sonny Software