Do not show empty column in Merge Entries

[koppor]

1. Download https://www.iaas.uni-stuttgart.de/publications/INPROC-2014-24-Lego4TOSCA-Composable-Building-Blocks-for-Cloud-Applications.pdf
2. Start JabRef
3. Create a new library
4. Save the library
5. Drag and drop INPROC-2014-24-Lego4TOSCA-Composable-Building-Blocks-for-Cloud-Applications.pdf into the library
6. JabRef shows following dialog:
   

Expected:

1. No dialog appears, because there is only one "real" source of information
2. If there are other cases of PDFs with more columns, an empty column should not be shown

Task

1. Find out where this dialog is called whren dropping a PDF to the main table
2. Adapt code accordingly. Maybe, an existing entry should not be passed at all? Maybe an empty entry needs to be removed.

[Vane-Arellano]

/assign-me

[github-actions]

👋 Hey @Vane-Arellano, thank you for your interest in this issue! 🎉

We're excited to have you on board. Start by exploring our Contributing guidelines, and don't forget to check out our workspace setup guidelines to get started smoothly.

In case you encounter failing tests during development, please check our developer FAQs!

Having any questions or issues? Feel free to ask here on GitHub. Need help setting up your local workspace? Join the conversation on JabRef's Gitter chat. And don't hesitate to open a (draft) pull request early on to show the direction it is heading towards. This way, you will receive valuable feedback.

Happy coding! 🚀

[Vane-Arellano]

Hi, @koppor !
I'm just starting to work in this issue, could you help me understand in which cases the dialog should be shown?
Also, when you say "...an empty column should not be shown" do you mean the 'Entry' column of the dialog?

Until now my understanding is this:

• When a single PDF is uploaded to JabRef in a new library, the Merge PDF data dialog should not shown. (Not sure if this only applies for new libraries or every time that only 1 PDF is uploaded)

[koppor]

Hi, @koppor !
I'm just starting to work in this issue, could you help me understand in which cases the dialog should be shown?
Also, when you say "...an empty column should not be shown" do you mean the 'Entry' column of the dialog?

Yes.

Until now my understanding is this:

• When a single PDF is uploaded to JabRef in a new library, the Merge PDF data dialog should not shown. (Not sure if this only applies for new libraries or every time that only 1 PDF is uploaded)

This is wrong understanding of meta data in PDFs. Investigate the test PDFs in the JabRef source and thr test cases. You will find PDFs having XMP Meta Data, embedded BibTeX etc. Each source forms a column.

The special case of this issue is that there is no entry existing.

I think it will narrow down to an if checking if there is more than one source of data (and then showing the dialogue)

In general this issue is more about finding the right place in the code (where to modify)

[Vane-Arellano]

@koppor
I found out ImportHandler.java is where it's been called, and the issue occurs in the next lines of code

I placed a validation under the PdfMergeDialog.java on createMergeDialog to only show the entry when it has fields and this solved the problem of not showing the empty entry column

I just have one question regarding the creation of the dialog, I don't fully understand in which cases would you like to create the new BibEntry and place it as is like shown in the image above? ADR-0043 is mention but not sure where I can found it

Also, debugging the code, I found that the file does have a correct entry:
@inproceedings{INPROC-2014-24,
author = {Florian Haupt and Frank Leymann and Alexander Nowak and
Sebastian Wagner},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Conference on Cloud
Computing (CLOUD 2014)},
doi = {10.1109/CLOUD.2014.31},
pages = {160-167},
publisher = {IEEE},
title = {Lego4TOSCA: Composable Building Blocks for Cloud Applications},
year = {2014},
_jabref_shared = {sharedId: -1, version: 1}
}

but when opening the dialog, ends up being:
@misc{,
_jabref_shared = {sharedId: -1, version: 1}

any idea why this could be happening or is something expected?

In between these two entries, the parsed entry after setting comments and serialization looks like this:

:

@inproceedings{INPROC-2014-24,
author = {Florian Haupt and Frank Leymann and Alexander Nowak and
Sebastian Wagner},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Conference on Cloud
Computing (CLOUD 2014)},
doi = {10.1109/CLOUD.2014.31},
pages = {160-167},
publisher = {IEEE},
title = {Lego4TOSCA: Composable Building Blocks for Cloud Applications},
year = {2014},
_jabref_shared = {sharedId: -1, version: 1}
}

And that is what's being trying to insert to the database (see line 334 of BibtexParser.java) is the ':' intended?

[koppor]

@Vane-Arellano I created a test PDF for you at #13177

If I drop this into JabRef, following dialog appears:

The first column should go:

Note that one can click on the headings to select the source for the diff

[koppor]

ADR-0043 is mention but not sure where I can found it

It's in docs/decisions

https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/blob/main/docs/decisions/0043-show-merge-dialog-when-importing-a-single-pdf.md