CDR Tickets

Is this really a bug?

 if the Display and Navlabel AltTitles are still being used 

We know that the Navlabel is not used when a summary is hot-fixed. We always have to request a manual update after hot-fixes (e.g. CGOV-13459)
, and it looks like it is the same for existing summaries that are published during regular scheduled publishing jobs. As far as I know, we have not requested that the left navigation label be updated for new summaries that are published.

We know that the Navlabel is not used when a summary is hot-fixed.

I did some digging and here's what I found.

• the CDR software currently does not do anything with the Navlabel alternate titles

• the publishing software sets the browser title field of the summary's Drupal node to the value of the Short alternate title, of which there must be exactly one for each summary, no more than 64 characters long, as enforced by the CDR schema custom validation rules

• the Drupal code which stores the summary received from the CDR makes sure that the entity name for the taxonomy Site Section entity which points to the summary has the value in that browser title field

• that taxonomy entity has another field which can be manually populated to override the entity's name field; if that second field has a value, that's what shows up in the navigation panel on the left side of the web page for the summary; otherwise, the browser title field's value (derived from the CDR document's Short alternate title) is what appears in that panel

This would explain why changing the Short alternate title in the CDR to modify the label in the left navigation panel might work sometimes but not always. Once someone has entered a label in the field to override the taxonomy entity's name, it's beyond the reach of the CDR, unless and until that field is cleared.

I have combed through all of the CDR code, and I have not been able to find any place where we're using the Display alternate title, beyond including it in the XML we give to the PDQ data partners. Not any easy thing to find, though, with "Display" being such a generic string, so there's a slim possibility that I've missed something.

I see in the PDQ Partner documentation that we've added the AltTitle with its two attributes "Short" and "Display" in March 2007.  However, there is no additional information on what it may be used for.

I'm not clear yet on how that overriding element gets populated.  Does it get populated with the short title when a summary is created or is empty until it gets entered/updated manually?

Well, I figured there's one way to find out. I created a new summary on www-cms-dev, and this is what the new taxonomy entity looks like.
 

So, the answer to your question is no, the field is not populated automatically when the summary is created.

However, that doesn't mean the name of the entity is used in the left nav panel in such a case. In fact, there is no left nav panel.

We're now able to answer a couple of our original questions:

1. Are the Display and Navlabel AltTitles still used?
   The short answer is 'No'.  The 'Short' title is the only of the three AltTitles that are currently pushed to Cancer.gov.

2. Can those AltTitles not used be removed from the CDR?
   If there aren't any plans to include these titles on Cancer.gov there isn't any value in updating or keeping these AltTitles.

3. Where is the Short AltTitle used on Cancer.gov?
   See below

4. Are other versions of summary titles used requiring manual updates after a summary title change?
   All other titles that are not listed under (3) require manual updates in case of a summary title change.

By default, there are two places that are displaying the Short AltTitle.  That is on the Cancer Type Home Page card (CTHP) and in the left navigation bar.  If a new summary is added to an existing cancer type, the short title will appear in the card (after a manual step to add this summary to the cancer type) and on the left nav

CTHP:

Left Nav:

Without any additional changes these two titles will always show the (updated) short title of the summary.  However, there is a place in Drupal that allows the left nav title to be overridden with some other text.  The rule is to always show the Short title as long as the overriding content - called Navigation Label - is empty.  If it is not empty display the content of that Navigation Label.

Entering the Navigation Label has several consequences:

• Once entered the left nav title display is not driven anymore by the short title

• A change to the short title will still update the title on the CTHP card but not both, CTHP and left nav

• The titles for CTHP and left nav which by default would be identical will now - most likely - differ

• Any change to the left nav title will have to be performed manually 

Here is the left nav after the "Navigation Label" has been manually entered.

As discussed at our status meeting we want to look at a report on summary titles to see how many documents would be affected.  I've created a quick query on DEV (which contains PROD data as of last weekend) in the Query Interface with the title "Summary AltTitles".  I'm listing all summaries with more than one AltTitle on this report and there are 928 rows (i.e. around 460 summaries).

I have reviewed the query. Considering the number of summaries involved I think it is worth proceeding with the global change. Would you want to do the global change as part of this ticket or I should create a new ticket for the global change?

I think it would make sense to create a separate ticket for the global change.

The workflow for the AltTitle elements have been identified and documented.  The AltTitle with the TitleType="Navlabel" will be removed in a separate ticket.