What is it?
CSharp MARC is a set of C# class structures for reading and manipulating Library of Congress MARC records using the MARC21 standard. It is based upon the PHP Pear package File_MARC by Dan Scott.
Who am I?
I am Matt Schraeder, a C# and PHP Developer for Bound to Stay Bound Books, Inc. in Jacksonville, IL. I was hired in 2008 to do web development and have since handled several projects in C# to help manage the website. In my free time I am admin and correspondent for My Two Copper, a video game review and podcast website. I spend a lot of time gaming, specifically in World of Warcraft, and I am active in several open source communities. I went to college at Lincoln Land Community College where I developed a Dungeons and Dragons v3.5 Character Sheet generator in Borland C++Bulider 5. In high school I dabbled with C++ and TI-BASIC.
How did this come about?
Generating and working with MARC records for our customers is an important of Bound to Stay Bound. We began using File_MARC on the website for it's speed and stability compared to the custom MARC code we were using previously. It made it extremely easy to insert, remove, and modify tags within the records and I really liked how it broke down records. At the time I started this project we were using a decades old COBOL script to generate records for our customers. It was complicated to work with and new customers had to be hard coded into the script by one of our developers. I was assigned to build a new system from scratch that would let our customer service department enter in specifications for our customers and then generate new records based on those settings. Since I was most familiar with C# for desktop application development, that is what I decided to work with. Unfortunately there were no libraries for reading or writing MARC records within C# at the time. Due to my previous work with File_MARC, I decided to use it as the basis for a similar project in C#. With my boss' permission I was able to release my class structures under the GPL.
What sort of licensing is CSharp MARC?
CSharp MARC is licensed under version 3 of the Lesser GNU Public License. Other licensing, such as for commercial use, is available on a case by case basis This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
What has changed in CSharp MARC since it's initial release?
2012-06-13 Changes:
Added FileMARCReader class for handling large MARC21 files without loading the entire file into memory. Special thanks to Stas Paladiy for reporting this issue and helping resolve it.
Updated Copyright information for the year 2012!
2011-09-12.2 Changes:
Apparently not even Library of Congress MARCXML records follow the XSD specification. I've removed the requirement that records validate before being added.
No longer ordering the tags when importing a MARCXML record.
2011-09-12.1 Changes:
CSharp_MARC can now read MARCXML files. The FileMARCXML class can accept XML strings or native .NET XDocument objects and convert them to Record objects.
The FileMARC(string source) constructor and ImportMARC function were duplicating code from the FileMARC.Add(string source) function. The coding horror is me :negative:
2011-06-30 Change:
Added Clone() to Fields, Subfields, and Records. This is a DEEP clone and all members should be properly cloned as new instances.
2011-04-26 Change:
Changed how validating a tag works when decoding due to "not thinking syndrome"
2011-03-04 Changes:
Updated copyright information
Added x86 Platform for easier testing. Apparently it didn't stick when I added it earlier.
Testing suite to test the class structure and included methods. This will get more advanced as I port specific tests from File_MARC.
Added a bit of extra error checking to a Field's tag so that it's not possible to assign an invalid tag.
If the FileMARC parser comes across an invalid tag, it forces the tag to "ZZZ" and should no longer throw an exception.
Made Field.IsEmpty() abstract. It's not possible to assign a Field with an empty string tag. Doing so should cause an exception. If this is in fact the case, then IsEmpty on Field should never return true. Because of this IsEmpty is now an override on both DataField and ControlField. Field.IsEmpty now returns the result of it's inherited version.
ToString functions for ControlField and DataField changed to overrides. Field.ToString seemed odd to only output the tag and not the inner data if available.
Fixed bug in ControlField.IsEmpty() returning opposite of expected results. Amazing how much unit testing helps!
DataField.FormatField() with no exclude codes as parameters actually works now.
Added a bit of extra error checking and cleanup to the indicators in the decode function.
Indicators are now closer to the MARC21 standard, allowing both numbers and letters. Uppercase letters are forced to lowercase. # is no longer a valid character, as it is supposed to indicate an ASCII SPACE. Invalid characters are automatically changed to ASCII SPACE and warnings are added to indicate this
Moved warnings into the Record object rather than FileMARC. This makes it easier to track which warnings were for which Record. This change may be API breaking and I apologize for that.
Fixed a bug where it is possible to make an invalid record by setting the Leader to a string longer than 24 characters. Now it will still allow you to set a long Leader but will only output the first 24 characters.
Fixed a bug where if the Leader was less than 24 characters it would make an invalid record.
You can now make tags that are not exactly 3 characters. It will automatically pad the leading 0s.
Field.ToString() is now an abstract override rather than an abstract new. No idea what I was thinking with it as new.
Record.ToString() doesn't have to check what type it is, thanks to override!
Totally had the IEnumerable designed wrong. Reset should reset to -1, as MoveNext will take you to the first record. After a reset it was ignoring the first record. My bad!
2011-02-16 Changes:
Added personal email to copyright notices.
Updated copyright years
Added an overloaded GetSubfields() so you no longer have to pass in null to get all subfields.
Changed Warnings from protected to public. No idea what I was thinking there.
Tons more error checking in the FileMARC decode function due to coming across an egregiously bad record.
Now with fancy new Demo application! Hopefully it has enough example code to get people started better.
Updated solution files to VS2010
Probably some other stuff.
