Z39.50 Client Refreshed

I’ve refreshed the Z39.50 client in the 5.0 beta. Much of the credit to this goes to Larry Dixon of the Library of Congress for testing and providing suggestions. The revisions are fairly significant and include corrections or additions to:
1) Batch search — when doing a query, one would get a blank file. Oops, my bad. I have an internal limiter that limits the number of records returned and I forgot to set it.
2) Removed ISBN/ISSN normalization. I was told that some servers allow hypen others do not — so I’m leaving this up to the user to know which it might be for their particular database.
3) Corrected an error in the Title/Author batch search that was causing it to fail.
4) Added a status and results label to the Single Search mode so you can tell how many results were recieved and how many were downloaded.
5) Added a get next feature in the Single Search. This way, you can query beyond the limit set in the software. However, there is a 1000 record hard limit per query.
6) Updates to the database table wasn’t propogating through the application. This should be corrected now.
7) Structure @attr 4 is now being setup correctly. I’d made a small error that had cause some structures to fail when included in a query.
8) Added the ability to change download file and append options from the Download record area.
9) Added code to determine of the format of the record retrieved is MARC or not. If MARC, its processed by the MARCEngine — if not MARC, it is displayed differently.
10) Syntax setting in the properties window is now editable. This way, you can enter different flavors of MARC (ukmarc, finmarc, chinmarc, etc).

I’m making this refresh available as both just a component update and a full install update. If you just need to update the Z39.50 client, you can download the following: mebatch2005_08_25.zip and just copy the contents of the zip file to the c:\program files\marcedit 5.0\ directory. This will overwrite the current mebatch executable and allow you to try the latest and greatest.

Or, if you need to refresh your beta install, you should first uninstall any previous version of the beta and then download the updated installer from: MarcEdit50_Setup.exe. This also includes the latest and greatest z39.50 client.

–Terry