Group as implicit conditional and variable container-title-short

tillheilmann · October 19, 2017

With Zotero 5, the group rendering element does not act as an implicit conditional in all cases anymore. In my specific case, the culprit is a macro calling the variable container-title-short (in one of my custom CSL styles). Now, a group calling, among others, this variable through the mentioned macro produces output even when all the variables called in the group are empty. This did not happen in Zotero 4. Any thoughts or ideas?

adamsmith · October 19, 2017

Just to be clear -- Zotero 5 isn't really the issue here. If there are changes, they are caused by recent changes in citeproc-js and would, e.g., also manifest in Zotero 4 with the Propachin add-on.

Ideally we'd get a minimal working example of this. Is it limited to container-title-short? Does the same group work correctly with the variable called directly?

tillheilmann · October 19, 2017

Alright, got it. And you are right: When I copy all of the code from the macro and put it in the corresponding spot of the citation section of my CSL (i.e. when I call container-title-short directly) the problem disappears. Hm...

tillheilmann · October 19, 2017

Do you want a MWE?

adamsmith · October 19, 2017

that'd be helpful, yes, thanks.

tillheilmann · October 19, 2017

Okay, here is the MWE:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/65szkhcupmqh5lo/mwe.csl?dl=0

adamsmith · October 19, 2017

Thanks -- so in case that helps, this works if you remove the condition around

<choose>
      <if variable="container-title-short">
	<text variable="container-title-short"/>
      </if>
    </choose>
  </macro>

i.e. just
<text variable="container-title-short"/>
which doesn't change anything here.
This isn't right (and there obviously are situations where this test would matter), but citeproc-js has always struggled when you nest conditions too deeply.

tillheilmann · October 20, 2017

So, I've modified the MWE, and now it seems that it's not (or at least not only) the variable container-title-short, but whether the group is inside the conditional or the other way around. Can you confirm this?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/65szkhcupmqh5lo/mwe.csl?dl=0

If so, where can I file a bug report?

tillheilmann · October 22, 2017

Okay, I posted a bug report on https://github.com/Juris-M/citeproc-js/issues/56

bwiernik · October 22, 2017

@fbennett