Hello all,
I have been working on a parent/child relation between two BE references for about three days. Everything appears to be working except citations of the child. I have stared at this, read over the manual, and tested it to exhaustion, trying to avoid posting here. I bring nearly 50 years of experience in software and systems to this; I am accustomed to this sort of detailed configuration, and I am stumped. It may be something simple I have overlooked, but I am not seeing it.
Unfortunately what follows is detailed to summarize all I have done; I have written it somewhat in newspaper style to be easier to read.
I have a dictionary with signed entries. I could duplicate everything in independent BE references, but I would like to define a parent dictionary entry with child entry references for each author/entry I cite. In the long run I think that might be easier to maintain (although probably lost with the time lost in trying to make it work).
With Jon's generous help I have created a new link for Dictionary -> Dictionary Voice and set up the metatype relation.
I have a parent reference that has the common data for all cites of that dictionary, with no entry or entry author. That parent is of Type “Dictionary”.
I have a dictionary entry child reference that has three fields with values: entry author (a), dictionary entry (u1), and year (d). It is a linked child of the parent dictionary that should pull the parent data in using square brackets to complete the citation.
I am using author-date-uniqueid temporary citations, pulled into Scrivener via cmd-Y, eventually compiled to RTF and scanned in Nisus Writer Pro. They look like this:
{Evans, 2000, #122430} (parent)
{Evans, 2000, #235111} (child)
I added the “Dictionary Voice [Dictionary]” type to the Formats Manager, and I defined format strings that show properly formatted biblio and citation lines at the bottom of their respective windows.
The scan-created bibliography entry is formatted correctly, according to the metatype format string. I can modify the format string, and I can see that change propagate to the generated biblio entry, so I know that is working.
Citations of the child are not working. The scan created this as the child citation:
C.A. Evans, (2000).
[NB: I edited this to change the year in the child dictionary entry from 2001 to 2000; it occurred to me that the mismatch might be important in identifying the parent. The change did not alter the behaviour; it still is not using the “Dictionary Voice [Dictionary]” citation specification.]
The scan does not appear to be referencing the “Dictionary Voice [Dictionary]” metatype citation format string defined in the Formats Manager. There is special unconditional text “in voice” in the format string to test it (below), and that text was not in the generated citation.
Code: Select all
a~, “~u1~,” in voice ~[t~. (~l~: ~u~, ~d~).~]
Repeating and summarizing, I think the problem is that the “Dictionary Voice [Dictionary]” citation string in the Formats Manager is never referenced, and I don’t know why. As mentioned above, the bibliography format string in that format is referenced and looks good.
I built a new two-reference database with only these two references and defined the parent/child link there, and it acts the same. I verified and reindexed the two databases.
Any idea what might be happening, or what additional testing I could do?
Thanks very much; I wish I could have avoided bothering the forum.