Add Authors to Future and Back Issues' "Table of Contents"

Software Support
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1

Hello folks! Recently I faced with my editors’ request to have a better view of the future issue’s table of contents. Working on a ToC with many papers is really difficult, because very often the articles have similar titles and it’s hard to recreate a right order.

I edited just two php files (on OJS 3.3.0-6) to get this list with the author/title view:

Authors_on_FutureIssues

I want to share it with the community for three reasons. (a) I’m not a coding expert, so I’d like if someone could check my changes! (b) I hope it can be useful for other users and (c) I want know if it’s a common necessity.

In this case, I’d love if it can become a new feature for next releases. Obviously it would mean that I don’t have to change my code with every update!

Instruction to edit files

To change the Table of Contents, I edited just two files. The first one is /controllers/grid/toc/TocGridHandler.inc.php. You need to find these lines that managed the unique standard column (about titles)…

    // Article title
    $this->addColumn(
        new GridColumn(
            'title',
            'article.title',
            null,
            null,
            $tocGridCellProvider
        )
    );

…and replace them with the following ones. They add a new column with authors; furthermore, they resize both column with an horizontal ratio of 25/75%.

  // Article author
  $this->addColumn(
  	new GridColumn(
  		'author',
  		'article.author',
  		null,
  		null,
  		$tocGridCellProvider,
  		['width' => 24 /*percent*/, 'maxLength' => 25 /*digits*/]
  	)
  );
  
  // Article title
  $this->addColumn(
  	new GridColumn(
  		'title',
  		'article.title',
  		null,
  		null,
  		$tocGridCellProvider,
  		['width' => 74 /*percent*/]
  	)
  );

At this moment, you have two columns but the system doesn’t know where it can find the author’s name. So you take the second file /controllers/grid/toc/TocGridCellProvider.inc.php, now. Search for the following lines.

    switch ($columnId) {
        case 'title':
            return ['label' => $element->getLocalizedTitle()];

And replace them with these ones, in which I added the case ‘author’ to point at the authors’ names.

  switch ($columnId) {
  	case 'author':
  		return array('label' => $element->getShortAuthorString());
  	case 'title':
  		return array('label' => $element->getLocalizedTitle());

If everything works, now you have a nice double-columned Table of contents, with authors and titles. Unfortunately, the sections titles appear in the first short column and so they are truncated. However I preferred to not edit more files to change them.

(I already shared the code in a github topic, but it was from 2019 so I thought it has no visibility at all today. Sorry if I shouldn’t repost it here too.)

1 Like
2

Page numbers can also be displayed on this page.
It is needed to order articles.

3

Is it a question or a suggestion? :grinning:

However I don’t know if it’s possible to add the page numbers too, there. Technically it is, but the “page numbers” field isn’t mandatory, so you should arrange a column with an if/else instruction…

4

It is a suggestion :slightly_smiling_face: