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videos:customizing_record_views [2023/05/09 19:01] – [Transcript] crhallbergvideos:customizing_record_views [2023/08/01 12:13] (current) – [Transcript] demiankatz
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 Hello, and welcome to this month's VuFind tutorial video. This month, we're going to be talking about customizing VuFind's record views. Hello, and welcome to this month's VuFind tutorial video. This month, we're going to be talking about customizing VuFind's record views.
  
-So to give a quick overview, I should first say that this is a very in-depth detailed topic, and we can only stretch the surface of it in a brief video. So I encourage you to look at the learning VuFind book, look at the code, look at the wiki, and ask questions of the community if you need more help. But I hope that this video will provide some useful context, and at least show you some of the starting points you'll need to explore to get a deep understanding of all of these concepts.+So to give a quick overview, I should first say that this is a very in-depth detailed topic, and we can only scratch the surface of it in a brief video. So I encourage you to look at the learning VuFind book, look at the code, look at the wiki, and ask questions of the community if you need more help. But I hope that this video will provide some useful context, and at least show you some of the starting points you'll need to explore to get a deep understanding of all of these concepts.
  
 So in this video, we're going to talk about record drivers, which are the way VuFind internally represents individual records regardless of where they come from. We're going to talk about the record data for matter, which is a tool that VuFind uses to display tables of data taken from records, which makes it easy to customize particular parts of the user interface in sophisticated ways. And I'm going to do a quick demo of how you can add a custom field to your VuFind instance if you have something you want to display that's not part of the core system. So in this video, we're going to talk about record drivers, which are the way VuFind internally represents individual records regardless of where they come from. We're going to talk about the record data for matter, which is a tool that VuFind uses to display tables of data taken from records, which makes it easy to customize particular parts of the user interface in sophisticated ways. And I'm going to do a quick demo of how you can add a custom field to your VuFind instance if you have something you want to display that's not part of the core system.
  
-So let's start by talking about record drivers. What is a record driver? A record driver isn't abstraction. It is a PHP object wrapped around some metadata with accompanying custom templates. And this is how VuFind displays all of the data coming from all of the records that it interacts with.+So let's start by talking about record drivers. What is a record driver? A record driver is an abstraction. It is a PHP object wrapped around some metadata with accompanying custom templates. And this is how VuFind displays all of the data coming from all of the records that it interacts with.
  
 The idea here is that VuFind only interacts with data using record driver code. It does not directly interact with the data. What do I mean by that? For example, in a MARC record, the title is stored in a 245 field. But information about things like 245 fields only exists inside record driver code. Outside of the record driver, VuFind only cares about getting a title. It asks the record driver, please give me a title. And the record driver, if it's wrapped around a MARC record, gives it the 245 field. If it's wrapped around a Dublin core record, it gives it the DC title field, etc, etc. So it lets us encapsulate all of the specific metadata handling in one place and write more generic, more reusable, more flexible code that can interact with all kinds of things at a higher level. The idea here is that VuFind only interacts with data using record driver code. It does not directly interact with the data. What do I mean by that? For example, in a MARC record, the title is stored in a 245 field. But information about things like 245 fields only exists inside record driver code. Outside of the record driver, VuFind only cares about getting a title. It asks the record driver, please give me a title. And the record driver, if it's wrapped around a MARC record, gives it the 245 field. If it's wrapped around a Dublin core record, it gives it the DC title field, etc, etc. So it lets us encapsulate all of the specific metadata handling in one place and write more generic, more reusable, more flexible code that can interact with all kinds of things at a higher level.
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 So for example, if we had templates that were specific to VuFind record driver MARC, they would be in a folder called templates record driver MARC, not using the VuFind piece of the name. Again, most of VuFind's default templates are actually defined in the default record directory because most of what we display by default is bibliographic record type stuff. So we just have these core templates that we reuse across all the drivers, but if you need to customize something more specifically to a particular record driver, all you have to do is create a folder, put an override template in there, and that will be displayed only for records matching that particular type. And of course, VuFind uses record driver class inheritance to load the templates, so it tries to find the most specific available match. So for example, if we're displaying a MARC record based on the discussion earlier, MARC is a child of Solr default, Solr default is a child of default record, default record is a child of abstract base. There's a fairly deep inheritance tree in record because of the way we reuse functionality. Anyway, given given the MARC record, if VuFind needs to display it in search results, it's going to look and see, do we have a MARC search result template? If so, use it. If not, let's check if we have a Solr default result template. If we do use it, no, we don't. So we fall back another level. There is the default record search result template. That's what's going to end up getting used. So again, understanding these relationships between the templates and the classes and the ability to override is useful both to find the things that you want to customize and also to override things at the right level of specificity. So enough about record drivers, let's dive a little bit deeper into the record data formatter. The record data formatter is a view helper that was introduced in VuFind 4 and its purpose is to display tables of data extracted from record drivers using a configuration driven approach. The reason that this was built is that prior to VuFind 4 many of the custom templates record driver specific templates that I described earlier were basically really long HTML tables full of labels and values. So for example, if we had templates that were specific to VuFind record driver MARC, they would be in a folder called templates record driver MARC, not using the VuFind piece of the name. Again, most of VuFind's default templates are actually defined in the default record directory because most of what we display by default is bibliographic record type stuff. So we just have these core templates that we reuse across all the drivers, but if you need to customize something more specifically to a particular record driver, all you have to do is create a folder, put an override template in there, and that will be displayed only for records matching that particular type. And of course, VuFind uses record driver class inheritance to load the templates, so it tries to find the most specific available match. So for example, if we're displaying a MARC record based on the discussion earlier, MARC is a child of Solr default, Solr default is a child of default record, default record is a child of abstract base. There's a fairly deep inheritance tree in record because of the way we reuse functionality. Anyway, given given the MARC record, if VuFind needs to display it in search results, it's going to look and see, do we have a MARC search result template? If so, use it. If not, let's check if we have a Solr default result template. If we do use it, no, we don't. So we fall back another level. There is the default record search result template. That's what's going to end up getting used. So again, understanding these relationships between the templates and the classes and the ability to override is useful both to find the things that you want to customize and also to override things at the right level of specificity. So enough about record drivers, let's dive a little bit deeper into the record data formatter. The record data formatter is a view helper that was introduced in VuFind 4 and its purpose is to display tables of data extracted from record drivers using a configuration driven approach. The reason that this was built is that prior to VuFind 4 many of the custom templates record driver specific templates that I described earlier were basically really long HTML tables full of labels and values.
  
-The record data format is a view helper. It has a factory that builds it with default settings for VuFind. So if you look at the record data format or factory, you will find all of the default configurations from the various places where we display tables of data. These are things like the sort of core part of the record page where we display primary data about a record areas in some of the tabs like the description tab.+The record data formatter is a view helper. It has a factory that builds it with default settings for VuFind. So if you look at the record data formatter factory, you will find all of the default configurations from the various places where we display tables of data. These are things like the sort of core part of the record page where we display primary data about a record areas in some of the tabs like the description tab.
  
-The record data format replaces these difficult to maintain gigantic templates with configuration. Of course, with every advantage comes a disadvantage and the obvious disadvantage here is the record data format has a much steeper learning curve, customizing a giant HTML template is a matter of cut and paste. The the act of doing it is easy. It's the maintenance that's hard and the record data format are kind of reverses that making it harder to set things up in the first place because you have to learn more, but making the long term maintenance considerably simpler. So it's not perfect, but it's worth the investment in the long term. I think it saves many people some trouble.+The record data formatter replaces these difficult to maintain gigantic templates with configuration. Of course, with every advantage comes a disadvantage and the obvious disadvantage here is the record data formatter has a much steeper learning curve, customizing a giant HTML template is a matter of cut and paste. The act of doing it is easy. It's the maintenance that's hard and the record data formatter kind of reverses that making it harder to set things up in the first place because you have to learn more, but making the long term maintenance considerably simpler. So it's not perfect, but it's worth the investment in the long term. I think it saves many people some trouble.
  
-So let's talk about how the record data format or configuration works since understanding this is very important to actually making use of it. So the record data format is a view helper. It has a factory that builds it with default settings for VuFind. So if you look at the record data format or factory, you will find all of the default configurations from the various places where we display tables of data. These are things like the sort of core part of the record page where we display primary data about a record areas in some of the tabs like the description tab.+So let's talk about how the record data formatter configuration works since understanding this is very important to actually making use of it. So the record data format is a view helper. It has a factory that builds it with default settings for VuFind. So if you look at the record data formatter factory, you will find all of the default configurations from the various places where we display tables of data. These are things like the sort of core part of the record page where we display primary data about a record areas in some of the tabs like the description tab.
  
 And they were difficult to maintain and also very difficult to customize because if you wanted to change the order of two fields or add something new, you had to copy this entire huge template, customize it in your local theme. And then every time you had an upgrade to VuFind, you would have to reconcile any changes in that template with your local customizations. It was an error prone tedious process and just not very flexible. So the idea was instead of hard coding these tables into these templates, let's build a helper that takes a configuration that tells it what fields to display, how to display them, what order to display them in. And then if you want to customize something instead of copying and pasting potentially hundreds of lines of HTML and PHP, you can just adjust a configuration slightly. And thus you express your customization in a more specific and concise way, it's easier to reconcile during updates, etc. So of course that's the advantage here using the record data format or replaces these difficult to maintain gigantic templates with configuration. Of course, with every advantage comes a disadvantage and the obvious disadvantage here is the record data format has a much steeper learning curve, customizing a giant HTML template is a matter of cut and paste. The the act of doing it is easy. It's the maintenance that's hard and the record data format are kind of reverses that making it harder to set things up in the first place because you have to learn more, but making the long term maintenance considerably simpler. So it's not perfect, but it's worth the investment in the long term. I think it saves many people some trouble. So let's talk about how the record data format or configuration works since understanding this is very important to actually making use of it. So the record data format is a view helper. It has a factory that builds it with default settings for VuFind. So if you look at the record data format or factory, you will find all of the default configurations from the various places where we display tables of data. These are things like the sort of core part of the record page where we display primary data about a record areas in some of the tabs like the description tab. And they were difficult to maintain and also very difficult to customize because if you wanted to change the order of two fields or add something new, you had to copy this entire huge template, customize it in your local theme. And then every time you had an upgrade to VuFind, you would have to reconcile any changes in that template with your local customizations. It was an error prone tedious process and just not very flexible. So the idea was instead of hard coding these tables into these templates, let's build a helper that takes a configuration that tells it what fields to display, how to display them, what order to display them in. And then if you want to customize something instead of copying and pasting potentially hundreds of lines of HTML and PHP, you can just adjust a configuration slightly. And thus you express your customization in a more specific and concise way, it's easier to reconcile during updates, etc. So of course that's the advantage here using the record data format or replaces these difficult to maintain gigantic templates with configuration. Of course, with every advantage comes a disadvantage and the obvious disadvantage here is the record data format has a much steeper learning curve, customizing a giant HTML template is a matter of cut and paste. The the act of doing it is easy. It's the maintenance that's hard and the record data format are kind of reverses that making it harder to set things up in the first place because you have to learn more, but making the long term maintenance considerably simpler. So it's not perfect, but it's worth the investment in the long term. I think it saves many people some trouble. So let's talk about how the record data format or configuration works since understanding this is very important to actually making use of it. So the record data format is a view helper. It has a factory that builds it with default settings for VuFind. So if you look at the record data format or factory, you will find all of the default configurations from the various places where we display tables of data. These are things like the sort of core part of the record page where we display primary data about a record areas in some of the tabs like the description tab.
videos/customizing_record_views.1683658902.txt.gz · Last modified: 2023/05/09 19:01 by crhallberg