Unify month field formatting in test bib files (JabRef/jabref#5116)

[sfo]

After some extensive use of grep and sed, this should finally solve #5116.

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• Change in CHANGELOG.md described
• Tests created for changes
• Manually tested changed features in running JabRef
• Screenshots added in PR description (for bigger UI changes)
• Ensured that the git commit message is a good one
• Check documentation status (Issue created for outdated help page at help.jabref.org?)

[Siedlerchr]

Oh, seems like it broke a lot of tests...

[omer-rotem1]

I tried to look into #5116, as a good first issue. Here's what I did:

1. Changed the months in the bib files to be in the format oct, not #oct#
2. Ran tests. 3 RIS tests failed, as they were expecting the month to include the surrounding #s, but they didn't.
3. Went to RisImporter.java and set the month this way:
   if (month.isPresent()) { entry.setField(StandardField.MONTH, month.get().getShortName()); }
   But now, other tests have failed - this time, because they actually included the surrounding #s, but were expecting no surroundings #s.

That's why I believe just changing the test bib files won't work, and this requires some changes to the actual code as well.

[sfo]

Okay, thanks for your feedback and sorry for the confusion. I will have a look at it.

[tobiasdiez]

Thanks for the explanation @omer-rotem1 ! The month should be set via

jabref/src/main/java/org/jabref/model/entry/BibEntry.java

Line 101 in 99a0a7a

public Optional<FieldChange> setMonth(Month parsedMonth) {

[omer-rotem1]

@tobiasdiez Thanks for pointing this out! I agree that if there's one function to set the month it should be used, but as I'm new to JabRef I'm still trying to understand why the month is surrounded by #s in JabRef (see this.)

I'm also interested to know why when JabRef generates the bib file it doesn't serialize the month correctly, but that's probably the bug we're trying to fix here.

[omer-rotem1]

I created a small pull request to fix #5116 (only the 3 tests cases where the bib files were written incorrectly): pull request

[tobiasdiez]

I've now merged the PR by @omer-rotem1, so that we get proper attribution for his work. Of course, the other instances of wrong month values found by @sfo should be fixed as well.

(@omer-rotem1 It us usually best-practice in open-source development that you ask before working on the same issue as somebody else. It's just more time economic for everybody involved.)

[omer-rotem1]

@tobiasdiez Thanks for the heads up. Will follow next time.

[sfo]

I rebased onto master and fixed the issues with parsers and exporters. Tests are all green again. Looking forward reading your feedback.

[tobiasdiez]

Thanks for the follow-up. The code look good to me except the changes to the latex parsing/serializing which make me a bit uneasy (see below).

[tobiasdiez]

Please don't change this, but instead use getShortName in the exporters

[tobiasdiez]

Although this change makes sense to me and we might change the logic to your version in the future, I would prefer if we don't touch parsing and writing of latex files as part of this PR. There are just too many things that can go wrong and we don't have extensive tests in place to capture them.

Thus, please keep the current behavior here (month = jan is stored as #jan# in BibEntry; moreover, #jan# should be written as month = jan).

[koppor]

I think, this logic is also used to handle string constants (see https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/303489/9075), so we should be very cautious when touching this.

In short: A user should be able to enter a reference to a constant.

• BibTex: Journal = IEEE_M_COM <-> entry editor: #IEEE_M_COM#
• BibTex: Journal = {IEEE_M_COM} <-> entry editor: IEEE_M_COM

This is a "quick hack" existing since the early days of JabRef. No one came up with another solution. Especially when joining constants with "real" text: BibTex: Journal = IEEE_M_COM # {some more text}

[tobiasdiez]

@sfo could you please implement the minor suggestions so that we can merge? Thanks!

[koppor]

For reference: The thing with # is described at https://github.com/JabRef/help.jabref.org/blob/gh-pages/en/Strings.md. I also linked it from our entry editor help now.

Did not know that we even support typed String constants. Very nice. I think, this has much potential.

[koppor]

I added test cases for month = apr in #5531. master should be merged into this branch. If all test are green, the feedback of tobias should be included. If there are more errors, we really have to think about everything ^^.

[koppor]

I went through all the changes and created a follow-up PR at #5578.