[EP-tech] EPrints customization adding a dropdown menu with autocomplete

[Joel Rosental R.]

Hi,

I need to make some customizations to EPrints workflow pages, one of 
them and up to now the most difficult one for me is that in the 
"Details" stage in the workflow, where you put most of the item metadata 
like authors, etc.

Out-of-the-box EPrints comes with 3 fields to place the "Creators" of 
the item:

- Family Name
- Given Name / Initials
- Email

Right now although there is an auto-completation feature, many times 
information is entered in a wrong way, and hence it creates 
inconsistencies in our repository and we have to be fixing them manually.

I want to create a sort of dropdown menu that contains the names of our 
internal authors for publications, so when somebody have to place the 
name of one of our authors, it can be selected from the dropdown menu 
instead of having to write it (which is more error-prone).

This should look like this:

http://oi41.tinypic.com/30nhvly.jpg

The problem I'm having here, is that I would want that when somebody 
selects one author from the dropdown menu, rest of the fields ( Family 
Name, Given Name, and Email ) get populated automatically as it would if 
I use the auto-complete that comes out-of-the-box with EPrints.

I've ben been taking a look at the code and created a different script 
under the same directory where other cgi scripts are, but since I'm not 
an expert in Perl or SQL, I can't fully understand everything there.

Basically what I did was to copy the "name" script to a one called 
"internal_authors" and try to customize it a bit to take it as a base, 
here is the content of this file so far:

use EPrints;

use strict;

my $session = EPrints::Session->new();

# security?

my $content = "text/xml";
$session->send_http_header( content_type=>$content );
my $family = $session->param( "_name_family" );
my $given = $session->param( "_name_given" );
my $id = $session->param( "_id" );

my $database = $session->get_database;
my $dataset = $session->dataset( "eprint" );
my $name_field = $dataset->get_field( "creators_name" );
my $id_field = $dataset->get_field( "creators_id" );

# Here is the one that I've added for my new field
my $imdea_author_field = $dataset->get_field( "creators_imdea_author" );

my @fields = ( $name_field->get_sql_names, $id_field->get_sql_names);

But from here to to the EOF I don't know how to follow because I don't 
understand EPrints data structure nor the SQL statements and rest of the 
code..

In theory, with what I want it should be simpler than the out-of-the-box 
mechanism, in the sense that I would query the database to return me the 
rights values (associated with the email of each author) instead a list 
for the user to choose from when he types a letter and then multiple 
options appear in the text field.

Anyone could please give me any hint or help me anyhow?

Thanks in advance.

-- 

Joel Rosental R.
System Administrator

Tel: +34 91 481 69 87
Web: http://www.networks.imdea.org