Librarian-only: Empty brackets after author name

[zorae]

Problem

OL displays the years of birth and death in author links if you are signed in as a librarian. When both fields are empty, this is omitted. But when the fields contain something that no year can be parsed from, an empty pair of brackets with a hyphen is displayed.

Example page where the author’s birth year cannot be parsed because I set it to “19xx” to indicate that she was born in the 20th century.

Context

• Browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc): Safari
• OS (Windows, Mac, etc):
• Logged in (Y/N): Y
• Environment (prod, dev, local): prod

Breakdown

Requirements Checklist

• [ ]

Related files

• openlibrary/openlibrary/macros/BookByline.html

  Lines 7 to 12 in d9fb943

  	$if show_years and author.get('birth_date'):
  	$ birth_date_formatted = extract_year(author.get('birth_date'))
  	$if author.get('death_date'):
  	$ death_date_formatted = extract_year(author.get('death_date'))
  	$else:
  	$ death_date_formatted = ''

Stakeholders

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[SharkyBytes]

Hi @zorae,

Could you please help me reproduce this issue? Currently, I’m not signed in as a librarian; I’m using a local user account. Could you provide a reference or guide on how I can sign up or gain librarian access?

Alternatively, if it’s possible to reproduce the issue in a local environment, I do have the admin instance set up there. Any specific instructions or tips would be greatly appreciated!

[Rithvik1709]

Hey @zorae is this issue active , would love to contribute
thanks

[scottbarnes]

It's possible that copydocs.py and adding local users and changing their usergroups might be helpful here, if one desires to try to replicate this locally.

In terms of creating additional users, step 3 can probably be skipped if one is willing to use http://localhost:8080/admin/people to use the 'login as another user' feature that's available after clicking on a specific account (e.g. your new librarian account).

No idea whether any of this is relevant.

[tfmorris]

There are two related cases where useful author date information is not shown:

• when there is a death date, but no birth date, nothing is displayed
• the contents of the freeform date field isn't displayed if the structured birth & death date fields are empty. I don't remember it's name of the top of my head, but it typically contains things like "fl. 14th c." This is a legacy field which is no longer editable, but, if populated, usually contains useful disambiguation information.

[cdrini]

@SharkyBytes on the local environment, I would recommend altering

openlibrary/openlibrary/macros/BookByline.html

Lines 7 to 12 in d9fb943

	$if show_years and author.get('birth_date'):
	$ birth_date_formatted = extract_year(author.get('birth_date'))
	$if author.get('death_date'):
	$ death_date_formatted = extract_year(author.get('death_date'))
	$else:
	$ death_date_formatted = ''

and temporarily forcing it to have show_years=True, eg

$ show_years = True

And then you can modify an author to have specific birth / death dates we want to test.

I believe you will need to update the extract_year method/regex to support x and ? . I had a bit of a time finding which method this is, but I think it's the one in helpers.py . Note since this method is likely used in a lot of places, to avoid a breaking change in other spots (where e.g. it might expect only integers), add a new optional parameter to that method, int_only=True, and then set it to False inside the BookByLine template file. Best of luck!