ChangeLog: https://marcedit.reeset.net/software/update75.txt
Highlights
Preview Changes
One of the most requested features over the years has been the ability to preview changes prior to running them. As of 7.5.8 – a new preview option has been added to many of the global editing tools in the MarcEditor. Currently, you will find the preview option attached to the following functions:
- Replace All
- Add New Field
- Delete Field
- Edit Subfield
- Edit Field
- Edit Indicator
- Copy Field
- Swap Field
Functions that include a preview option will be denoted with the following button:
When this button is pressed, the following option is made available
When Preview Results is selected, the program will execute the defined action, and display the potential results in a display screen. For example:
To protect performance, only 500 results at a time will be loaded into the preview grid, though users can keep adding results to the grid and continue to review items. Additionally, users have the ability to search for items within the grid as well as jump to a specific record number (not row number).
These new options will show up first in the windows version of MarcEdit, but will be added to the MarcEdit Mac 3.5.x branch in the coming weeks.
New JSON => XML Translation
To better support the translation of data from JSON to MARC, I’ve included a JSON => MARC algorithm in the MARCEngine. This will allow JSON data to serialized into XML. The benefit of including this option, is that I’ve been able to update the XML Functions options to allow JSON to be a starting format. This will specifically useful for users that want to make use of linked data vocabularies to generate MARC Authority records. Users can direct MarcEdit to facilitate the translation from JSON to XML, and then create XSLT translations that can then be used to complete the process to MARCXML and MARC. I’ve demonstrated how this process works using a vocabulary of interest to the #critcat community, the Homosaurus vocabulary (How do I generate MARC authority records from the Homosaurus vocabulary? – Terry’s Worklog (reeset.net)).
OCLC API Interactions
Working with the OCLC API is sometimes tricky. MarcEdit utilizes a specific authentication process that requires OCLC keys be setup and configured to work a certain way. When issues come up, it is sometimes very difficult to debug them. I’ve updated the process and error handling to surface more information – so when problems occur and XML debugging information isn’t available, the actual exception and inner exception data will be surfaced instead. This often can provide information to help understand why the process isn’t able to complete.
Wrap up
As noted, there have been a number of updates. While many fall under the category of house-keeping (updating icons, UX improvements, actions, default values, etc.) – this update does include a number of often asked for, significant updates, that I hope will improve user workflows.
–tr