bib data goes missing after merging custom/local authority records

[Yamil]

* Evergreen version
EG 2.2 beta1
EG 2.2 beta2

  * OpenSRF version
2.1.0 RC1

  * PostgreSQL version
9.1

  * Linux distribution (type and version) on which Evergreen is running
Debian 6.0.4 "Multi-architecture"distro - running as a VM inside XenServer

bib data goes missing after merging custom/local authority records

NOTE: I am not a cataloger so my apologies if I butcher my terminology.

Let me give a little background on my set up. I configured a local authority control set to allow local bib tag 945 to be auhority controlled as the 145 tag in authority records. Here are the ESI intructions for this feature: http://www.esilibrary.com/esi/docs/?p=771 We do this because we are a music library and we chose to catalog individual song titles and their composers found in music recordings and scores in the bib 945 tag (linked to auth 145 tag). Also, we use subfield $a for the song title and subfield $c for the composer.

The bug arises if I have two seperate song title authority records for the same song by the same composer, I would then want to merge the two song title authority records. The first problem I see when I do a merge is that if either or both authroity records had bibs attached to them, after the merge the remaining authority record's "attached bib count" is set to zero. Also, once I refresh the marc edit display of the bibs that were attached to the recently merged song title authority record, most of the bib data fails to show up on the screen. The bib data is also missing from the OPAC view.

Here is an example:

From within "manage authorities" view the process looks like this...
              Pre-merge data:
                              "1 Round Midnight
                               2 Round Midnight
                               1 Round Midnight"

               Post-merge error data:
                              "0 Round Midnight"

               Expected post-merge data:
                              "4 Round Midnight"

After the merge all linked bib records data rows were mostly empty when we merged the song title authorities. See screen shots using the example of song "So what" from the album Kind of Blue.

I had mentioned this bug before to miker back in fall 2011, but at the time I was running test servers that where based on the typically buggy master (post EG 2.1 release). That is why I am now checking on 2.2 beta1 since ti should be mroe stable than the master code I was using in the fall.

Also I am attaching my copies of "gateway.log" and "osrfsys.log" log files since they are the only log files that had content after I had pre-purged the logs before executing the auth merge. The logs files may not have anything useful, but I though they might help. For the record I executed the merge around time stamp 2012-04-16 13:57:00, give or take a minute or so. Finally I had a JS console open during the merge and there were no reported errors or warnings.

[Yamil (ysuarez)]

I was able to recreate the bug in EG 2.2 beta2. The rest of the server set up is the same as before.

[Lebbeous Fogle-Weekley (lebbeous)]

See this branch for some measures to avoid this problem (the commit message has more information): http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/senator/avoid-authority-merge-of-destruction

This doesn't preclude possible further measures to make this sort of data-loss scenario even less likely (or impossible).

This branch is intended for rel_2_2 and master.

[Bill Erickson (berick)]

Agreed these are nice improvements. Basic testing looks good. Merged to master and rel_2_2.