all items should contain a "citation key" field

[simon]

I don't think attachments and notes need to be modified--there aren't multiple "legacy" formats that rely on a user-assigned identifier.

Customization of the algorithm would be an improvement. However (as you point out), having a "citation key" field seems to be the only way to reliably roundtrip data that is imported with citation keys.

BibTeX is the most commonly used citation format that relies on identifiers. However, OO.o's current citation database relies on them. And local IDs are used by the endnote and RIS tagged formats, so there might be other third party apps that make use of them.

[dstillman]

Hmm, would this include attachments and notes (which currently have no interface for modifying fields)?

[dstillman]

Also, is this the best way to go about this? It seems the request, at least in terms of BibTeX, is generally to be able to customize the algorithm for key generation, not necessarily to be able to (or to have to) assign a particular key to each item individually.

We could implement this in a similar way to the attachment file renaming feature, where you can specify a format string that pulls in the fields you specify--it's currently limited to only a few fields plus the ability to specify the maximum length of a field, but if it supported more/all fields it might work for this too.

That wouldn't address the (less frequent) request of retaining BibTeX keys, but it seems those are usually generated from some amalgamation of the fields anyway, so the ability to use a format string might be sufficient.

Are there other cases (other than for BibTex) where we'd need this field?