Auto Search for form Field while adding new books to the database

[oldrepository]

May be I am not using the right term but I hope the explanation make it clear. As a user or admin adds new books to the catalogue, the book data field should have an auto search feature. If a book already exist in the database it should show up as the user types the name of the book, allowing the user not to add the same book twice. When adding author or other fields for a books this feature will help speed up the process by eliminating tying as the name will show up if it exist in the database, then the user can just click on it to add it.

And in case if the title already exists in the database then there should be a way to easily open that title and just edit it to update additional copies to the same title.

One way of achieving this would be to have edit button or link appear in front of the entry they appear in under the field as you type.

[pwhipp]

This will work fine with small numbers of books but as the search space of titles grows, repeating a title search of the book set for each character entered, refining the search as one goes is a fairly complex task.

This also has to be done in javascript since you have not completed the form entry. I've added admin searching and filtering and added scanned and ebook boolean fields.

Doing this is feasible but it would be a significant challenge in its own right, particularly if we are to be confident of its working for 10k+ titles.

[oldrepository]

The only thing I would like to achieve from this feature is to avoid adding multiple records of the same book. If theres another solution for this thats more feasible?

[pwhipp]

As we don't want the staff member adding stuff and then discovering it already exists, I think this is best handled procedurally. We can add staff pages to the site containing guidelines (they can be visible to just staff or to all - up to you). The guideline for adding a book could start with searching for one or two keywords from the title to verify that the book is not in the system. This might help with subject classification anyway.

The same issues logically exist for creators (authors), contributors and subjects but as these are simple names at the moment those are less of a concern.

[oldrepository]

I agree with you and we can definitely create guidelines to add a new book. An Idea came to my mind that when someone tries to add a book they first search for that title and if it is already there then thats fine we can just edit the existing to add editions or copies, but if the title is not found, in that case can we have a add title button appear beside the title name and that should take the person to the add book page and it should already add the title name to the title field, saving some typing. I think this approach will work much better.

[pwhipp]

So, as per our discussion:

I'll create a front end form for adding a book. It will start with just a 'title' field and this will lead to a page presenting similar titles that can be edited plus the option to make the title into a new book.

The new book form will be populated with the entered title so the user will not have to enter it again.