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Author/etc data in table of contents is silently dropped after some time?

Open cdrini opened this issue 6 months ago • 3 comments

Problem

I think this might be something in the internals of infobase.

e.g https://openlibrary.org/books/OL49205391M/The_great_modern_American_stories used to have author data in the table of contents when it was first added via tocky. But it has since disappeared, despite no edits causing its disappearance! More investigation needed.

Maybe the new fields must be added to https://openlibrary.org/type/toc_item in order to be correctly persisted during some infobase internal process?

Reproducing the bug

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Breakdown

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cdrini avatar Jun 13 '25 20:06 cdrini

Here is a screenshot of another record where I recently added the TOC with authors/subtitles/etc on 2025-06-13 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL16775111M/Art_of_this_century

Image

Going to monitor here and report if the extra data gets removed at some point.

cdrini avatar Jun 13 '25 20:06 cdrini

Aaaand, checked just now, and it's been silently dropped, despite not having been edited :(

Image

cdrini avatar Jun 17 '25 23:06 cdrini

Oddly, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL16775111M.json returns a rev 14 JSON with the author info included, while https://openlibrary.org/books/OL16775111M.json?v=14 returns a different rev 14 JSON which excludes the author info, so the info is getting filtered at some point. That probably also explains why the diff display doesn't show the authors https://openlibrary.org/books/OL16775111M?_compare=Comparer&b=14&a=13&m=diff since it's likely fetching the explicit version.

tfmorris avatar Jun 18 '25 01:06 tfmorris

Good find; sigh it least it's not fully gone I guess. Until someone edits the record and then I assume it is fully gone. This is likely an issue deep into infobase :/ But I do wonder if maybe updating the type here with the new fields might help... https://openlibrary.org/type/toc_item

cdrini avatar Jun 30 '25 18:06 cdrini