M724report

= M7.24 Upload service for complete bibliographies =


 * Due: 01 June 2012 (brought forward from 29 June 2012)
 * Delivered: 31 May 2012
 * Benefit: To make it easier to contribute to RefBank, both by individuals and by developers of data harvesters and aggregators who can now import many references in one call to RefBank. This is a pre-requisite to transform M7.25 from a minor to a major enhancement (see M725report).

Summary
To enhance RefBank's ease of use and increase its acceptance among users, this milestone extends RefBank's functionality so that it accepts multiple references being uploaded at the same time.

Use
Users can now add multiple references by putting them in the free text dialog box. If the references are plain text, each reference must start on a new line. Otherwise, following the introduction of additional reference format support in M7.23, each reference must be a complete reference as defined by the chosen format. Hence, they can span across many lines.

While adding support for multiple references in the web UI dialog box meets the milestone, it is not particularly easy to use for large bibliographies in which the user might have to cut'n'paste several hundred - if not thousand - references. Therefore, to make it easier for users to load large bibliographies, the ability to load the references as an attached file has been added to RefBank's web UI reference upload service. The task is further made easier for users by use of the standard Open dialog, in which users can browse for the reference file, rather than relying on the user to key in the full filename and path location. See screenshots below.

Note, the screenshots show the web UI upload screen after the implementation of this milestone as well as the associated milestones M7.21 to add the Your Name: field and  M7.23 to add support for additional reference formats. All three milestones enhancing RefBank's utility.



Screenshot to show RefBank's multiple reference upload options, in this case two BibTeX references.



Screenshot to show RefBank's message to user after loading multiple references, in this case two BibTeX references.

Implementation details
The web UI dialog was amended to add file attach and file browse functionality. RefBank's web service has been amended to match, so that it can extract multiple references either from the free text field refStrings in the screen or from the attached file. Once extracted, the references are passed to the appropriate RefBank module for further processing, eg if the references are in BibTeX format they are passed to the BibTeX conversion module. The references are passed one at a time, and processed individually, until all references are processed and the response can be sent back to the user.

ReCaptcha has been added to the upload screen to prevent bots loading spam into RefBank.