crossref workflow improvements

[ilippert]

For quite a number of my book entries I hold files for the complete book (parent entry). Now, many of these books are edited volumes.

I note 2 small improvements:

• allow to use the context menu/right click onto the parent entry for generating a new entry that crossreferences the selected parent entry (considering design discussion at UI: maintable: right-click menu: reorder items #6099)
• and whilst the crossreferencing already well uses many of the fields from the parent entry, several relevant fields are not used (yet):
  • The file/link fields should be crossreferenced, too, as to link to the parent's files/links.
  • The user should be able to flag user defined fields as shown in the crossreferenced entries (I can think of, say, the Printed field for a collection entry, or a field that specify the physical location at which a book can be found)
• Add option to make content of certain fields inheritable from parent to child entry
• Improve UI of entry table to account for crossref parent and child entries (see screenshot in this comment)

Together with #5484, #6404, #7057, these improvements would very much ease the use of/work with crossreferenced entries.

[ilippert]

see also #5765 which detailed the frustrations of worksteps in the current UI - to which @koppor added the UI label.

[ilippert]

I would very very much love to see this feature worked on :)

[koppor]

This somehow refs JabRef#85, where I described a way to avoid crossref (which is contradicting the proposal here)

[ilippert]

This somehow refs koppor#85, where I described a way to avoid crossref (which is contradicting the proposal here)

Thank you for noting this friction!

If of any use, I would be happy to organise some form of structured conversation on use cases or use philosophies of crossref. Should we consider a discourse/forum conversation about this?

[ilippert]

Refs #7731

[ilippert]

Regarding

* allow to use the context menu/right click onto the parent entry for generating a new entry that crossreferences the selected parent entry 

this request could also work with #4183 - i.e. a flyout popup that searches something fitting for a selected (or entered) string.

i.e. a user might mark/select an entry in the table, and then clicking on the new entry/flyout would offer to generate a new entry that crossreferences the marked entry.