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Alphabrowse Internals

To understand this, it is best to read the first author's documentation: The VuFind Browse Handler and then read Alphabetical Heading Browse in VuFind's documentation.

One thing that is not mentioned in that VuFind documentation page is the Solr field displayed for autocomplete is in searches.ini, section Autocomplete_Types.

Our customizations were to:

  • Add a new browse type: series (PC-110)
  • Add a new normalizer: TitleNormalizer (PC-362); it is part of VuFind now (VUFIND-1630)
  • Add alternative titles to title browse (PC-686, PC-1151); this required using a custom function for import (BrowseUtilMixin)
  • Improve autocomplete suggestions (PC-1151, PC-1181)

We use 2 new schema fields for title browse: title_browse and title_browse_sort to respectively display and sort title browse entries. They are both multivalued (as opposed to VuFind's default title_fullStr and title_sort), and the values should match between the 2 (in practice they don't when a filtered title ends up being empty). The values for these fields are created with BrowseUtilMixin (referenced by marc_local.properties), and used when creating the heading databases from index-alphabetic-browse.sh.