Confusing UI when manually adding book

[da5nsy]

Describe the bug
When manually adding a book, the confirmation dialog uses radio buttons despite there only being one selectable option. The confirm button does not function untill the radio buttons have been selected (but no warning is shown when it is pressed without the buttons having been selected).

Expected behavior

• Checkboxes instead, if there is always only one option.
• A warning which is shown if confirm is pressed without the boxes having been checked.

Screenshots

Instance
bookrastinating

---

Smartphone (please complete the following information):
- Device: Fairphone 3+
- OS: Android 13
- Browser: Firefox
- Version: 129.0.2

[hughrun]

Thanks for the report @da5nsy

Just want to clarify how you'd prefer this to work, and provide a little background:

There are sometimes multiple options for both author and work, but for each author and for the work, we can only select one of the existing authors/works. There can be multiple authors for a work, but here we are looking for any matches for each author.

So a radio button is the correct option: there can only ever be one option selected per author or work.

However, sounds like what you're pointing out is that:

• if there are no matches, it's a bit pointless to make the user select the only option (new author/new work).
• if you don't select anything and hit "Confirm", there's no error message telling you what you need to do

I can see three possibilities here to improve it (in addition to improving error handling):

1. auto-select "This is a new X" if there are no other options
2. bypass the confirmation screen completely if there are no matches on authors or work
3. a combination of the above - dependent on whether there are no matches at all, or merely no matches on one of author/work.

Option 1 would likely be the easiest to implement.

Have I captured this correctly?

[da5nsy]

Thanks @hughrun - that's useful background info, and I think you've captured the issue well. I think your proposed options sound good.