VUFIND-1710 Add configurable separators for topics in alphabrowse

[marktriggs]

Currently, subjects are shown differently between the record view in VuFind and the topic browse. In the record view you see delimiters like this:

Morris, William, > 1834-1896 > Criticism and interpretation.

But in the topic browse, the fields are just joined with spaces:

Morris, William, 1834-1896 Criticism and interpretation.

This commit:

• Adds a UTF-8 separator to delimit terms within topics in the Solr index

• Adjusts the topic_browse definition to use a new TopicNormalizer, which strips out these new delimiters when building the sort key.

• Changes the frontend of the AlphaBrowse to insert a user-configurable delimiter, shown when browsing topics.

Note: since Normalizer classes currently live in the vufind-browse-handler, there will be a corresponding commit there to add TopicNormalizer.

TODO

• Document Solr schema change when merging
• Resolve VUFIND-1710 when merging

[marktriggs]

@demiankatz @dltj Just sending the pull request for VUFIND-1710 to get the review rolling :)

Note that there's also a vufind-browse-handler PR to go with this one: vufind-org/vufind-browse-handler#51. I wasn't sure how best to handle the bundled browse-indexing.jar and browse-handler.jar files, so I've left them out of this PR for now.

[demiankatz]

@demiankatz @dltj Just sending the pull request for VUFIND-1710 to get the review rolling :)

Note that there's also a vufind-browse-handler PR to go with this one: vufind-org/vufind-browse-handler#51. I wasn't sure how best to handle the bundled browse-indexing.jar and browse-handler.jar files, so I've left them out of this PR for now.

Thanks, @marktriggs! vufind-org/vufind-browse-handler#51 looks reasonable to me, so I've gone ahead and merged it. That way, you can now build the .jar artifacts and add them to this PR so that we can test the whole thing together.

[demiankatz]

Here are a few comments from an initial review; I'll do more hands-on and automated testing once the .jar files have been added.

I'm also going to pin this to the 11.0 release, since 10.1 is very close and I don't want to introduce last-minute Solr schema changes.

[marktriggs]

Thanks @demiankatz,

I've applied the changes from your first review, and have checked in the updated jar files too. Do you have a quick way of testing on Windows? The .bat file changes are pretty trivial, but I'd feel better seeing them working. I can try getting things running on a Windows machine here if you don't have one handy.

[demiankatz]

Thanks, @marktriggs. I can try to test this out in Windows soon -- just having a busy week and haven't gotten that far yet.

In the meantime, see below for a tiny style suggestion.

Also, did you notice that tests are failing in PHP 8.3? Please let me know if you need any help investigating/sorting that out.

[marktriggs]

Thanks @demiankatz, and no rush from me.

I've fixed the comment syntax and figured out why that test was failing. The AlphaBrowse code returns items with keys heading and sort_key, but the test code was mocking items and only including heading.

Historically that didn't matter because the browse frontend only used heading anyway. There are two ways that the browse heading is used: the point where we show the heading to the user, and the point that we build a query link (with a lookfor parameter) to view the associated record(s). Up until now, the heading shown to the user was identical to the value stored in the Solr index, so there was no distinction between the two cases (and that's why just using heading exclusively was fine).

But now we're rewriting the delimiter in topics, what we display to the user isn't the same as what's in the index. So, heading is the label shown to the user, while sort_key is the index value needed for constructing a matching lookfor query.

[demiankatz]

@marktriggs, I was able to confirm that this works correctly in Windows. I tested the dev branch: no separators; I switched to this branch and rebuilt the index: separators appeared!

[demiankatz]

This looks good to me, and all tests are passing in my local environment. I'll just leave this open a little longer in case @dltj or others have any last-minute suggestions or concerns.

[dltj]

I'm good-to-go with this. Thanks, Mark and Demian!