EditBug:10073 Merging titles within a pub

• EditBug:10073 Merging titles within a pub OPEN If a magazine (any type of publication, probably, but I ran into it while fixing a magazine) includes multiple Content titles with the same title (in my test case, it was 3 INTERIORART titles for 3 different illustrations to the same story) and you merge these titles, the magazine table of contents becomes screwed up, listing the same Title multiple times. My guess is that it happens regardless of whether the merged Titles originally had the same title or not, but I didn't check. Once the merge problem has been fixed, we may want to run a data scan looking for these occurrencies so that we could go back and fix them. Ahasuerus 13:04, 27 Dec 2006 (CST)

This pretty much did what was asked of it. There were three titles in a publication, so each title individually pointed to the pub. The three were merged into a single title, so now that title points to each of the publications it appeared in - they just happen to be the same publication in this case. This one will require some thought. Alvonruff 10:44, 6 Jan 2007 (CST)

First, a detailed explanation. Consider 3 titles that appear in 3 pubs. This happens all the time:

   Title1 -> PubX
   Title2 -> PubY
   Title3 -> PubZ

When these titles are merged, the publication references are preserved, so that we see the title in each publication:

   Title1 -> PubX AND PubY AND PubZ

The problem reported here is that X, Y, and Z are all the same pubs:

   Title1 -> PubX AND PubX AND PubX

So the title shows up 3 times - which is exactly what we told it to do. If we only want to the title to show up once, then we should have removed the other 2 titles from the publication. There are 2 things to worry about:

• We should warn someone when they are merging two or more titles that appear in the same publication, and advise them about using rmtitle instead.
• Establishing the correct way to correct the above situation. Since only 1 title appears, the use of rmtitle will completey remove the title altogether, which is probably not desired. However, use of the unmerge tool is not desired on shortworks, as it forks a new title with the name of the publication it appeared in.

As such, we should do two things:

• Fix the title merge app to warn when merging two titles that share a publication.
• Add a requirement to the new unmerge tool to generate a title name that is the same as the title (instead of the publication), whenever the title is a short work.

Alvonruff 05:44, 9 Jan 2007 (CST)