Friday, June 10, 2011

Feature of the Week: Sort your Post Lists

The creation and export of publication lists has always been a core feature of BibSonomy. Using tags is an easy means to select publications for a list. Yet depending on the application, not only the selection of publications but also their order might be of importance. The latter can be controlled using the two URL parameters sortPage and sortPageOrder.
Here is an example: The URL
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social
returns a list of all posts of the user sdo with the tag social. Using the additional parameters sortPage=author and sortPageOrder=asc in the URL
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social?sortPage=author&sortPageOrder=asc
will yield that same list, ordered by the family names of the first authors in ascending order.

The parameter sortPageOrder has exactly two options: asc for ascending order and desc for the converse.
With the last release we added new options to the parameter sortPage. Thus one can now choose from: year, month, day, author, editor, entrytype, title, booktitle, journal, school and date.
All but the last one refer to fields of the according BibTeX entries of the posts. The option date however yields a list ordered by posting date -- the date of the post's (not the publication's) creation. The date option is the only one, that also concerns bookmark posts.

It is easily possible to combine different options using "|". For example will
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social?sortPage=year|month|day&sortPageOrder=desc
return a list where publication posts are ordered by their publication date (given in the BibTeX fields year, month and day).

Happy tagging!
Stephan