Need options for Select on Focus in MARC Edit

[Jason Boyer]

Eg 3.1+

Bug 1691263 added the ability to use contenteditable div's to better wrap long marc fields. It also changed the editing workflow by selecting the entire contents of a subfield when it receives the input focus. This has caused issues for some catalogers as they either accidentally delete the contents of the subfield or have to click multiple times to clear the selection and position the cursor where they wanted it initially.

This change should either be removed entirely (my personal preference) or made controllable by a persistent setting that staff can enable/disable.

[Meg Stroup (mstroup)]

Confirmed by SCLENDS (3.1.8, Google Chrome). Here is how one SCLENDS cataloger describes the web client change versus XUL:

"My biggest annoyance and time swallower is that you never know when adding a subfield or adding a field where the cursor is going to end up. Before, we knew the cursor would advance to the place where we could start typing, so we didn’t have to constantly eyeball the screen. Now, if you don’t watch it, you can end up wiping out the text in a subfield or field because the cursor didn’t advance."

The cataloger points out that it slows the natural workflow of cataloging by introducing the need to keep a close eye on where your cursor is. Many catalogers can "type" through a MARC record very quickly: in other words, for a cataloger, this is like typing a document but not being sure where the space bar will land your cursor (weird example, but I hope it helps explain why this is important to catalogers).

A related complaint is that it's difficult to undo the accidental deletions that result from this behavior. Current workaround is putting the cursor in the field where you accidentally deleted information and using CTRL+Z to resurrect the text letter-by-letter.

[Elaine Hardy (ehardy)]

Meg,

In 3.2.2, running on our test servers until our upgrade this weekend,if I accidentally delete the contents of subfield at one time, CTRL + Z brings back the entire deleted content. If I delete the contents of several subfields, I can return the contents by placing my cursor immediately to the right of each subfield tag in reverse order and and CTRL+Z restores each. This is in Chrome.

For a record already in the database, I can also switch to the MARC view tab to copy from the field and paste into the MARC editor.

I also redisplayed the record without saving, which is OK as long as you didn't have a lot of other edits already completed.

Since PINES does not create bib records in the database directly, I didn't look at possibilities there. (We do original in OCLC and import)

[Elaine Hardy (ehardy)]

While I see the dangers inherent in having the entire subfield focused, I would like to have text wrapping in the MARC editor