5.5. Add, edit, or delete bibliography styles

This task is currently restricted to the system administrators in order to prevent users overwriting each others bibliography styles. A more appropriate solution will be implemented later to allow users uploading their own styles.

Use the refdba command addstyle to add one or more bibliography style files to the database. Existing styles with the same name will be overwritten without a warning, so you should check with the liststyle command before you go ahead.

Note: The name of a bibliography style is encoded in the XML file. The filename of the bibliography style is irrelevant here. Use grep STYLENAME to see which bibliography styles are defined in a file and check with the liststyle command whether they're already defined in the database.

Warning

refdb uses a non-validating parser to load bibliography styles into the database. It is your responsibility to validate the files before you add them. Adding invalid styles may have undesired and unpredictable results.

The refdba command getstyle retrieves one or more bibliography styles as XML documents. In order to edit an existing bibliography style, simply retrieve the style with the getstyle command, edit the XML document as necessary, and add it again with the addstyle command. As stated above, this will overwrite the existing style definition.

Use the refdba command deletestyle to remove one or more bibliography styles from the database. The argument for this command is a Unix regular expression. All styles whose name match the regular expression will be deleted.