[Koha-bugs] [Bug 10456] New: z3950NormalizeAuthor and z3950AuthorAuthFields cause problems for MARC21 (and are sloppily written)

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http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=10456

            Bug ID: 10456
           Summary: z3950NormalizeAuthor and z3950AuthorAuthFields cause
                    problems for MARC21 (and are sloppily written)
    Classification: Unclassified
 Change sponsored?: ---
           Product: Koha
           Version: master
          Hardware: All
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P5 - low
         Component: Z39.50 / SRU / OpenSearch Servers
          Assignee: gmcharlt at gmail.com
          Reporter: dcook at prosentient.com.au
                CC: m.de.rooy at rijksmuseum.nl

Currently, if you've turned on z3950NormalizeAuthor and you have MARC21
records, you're going to get errors in the sub MARCfindbreeding in
addbiblio.pl.

It's because...

1) Koha checks the imported MARC record for a field nominated by biblio.author
(which is 100$a in most MARC21 installs). If that nominated tag is found in the
imported MARC record, it will try to create a new empty field with the same tag
(and no indicators).

2) Then, regardless of the outcome, it will try deleting that old field from
the record.

3) Then, for each of the tags in z3950AuthorAuthFields, it will try taking the
new $field (without checking to see if it's actually already been created) and
filling it with a re-arrangement of subfield values from the old field. 

4) Then, after it has tried adding all the subfields, it will try to insert the
$field back into the $record (again, without checking to see if there is even a
valid $field MARC object in the first place). 

Steps 3 and 4 cause Koha to get upset. 

Personally, I don't see the utility of "normalizing" the author, but I'm not
familiar with UNIMARC. 

>From a coding point of view, I think this section of code could benefit from
some error-checking.

>From the point of view of a MARC21 user, I'm tempted to just wrap it with a
MarcFlavour check, and ignore it since it should never be used by MARC21 users.

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