How to render a normal and compressed version of the bibliography in one document?

Question

I use biblatex and biber for the bibliography and I came to the problem that I need a subset of the bibliography to be in verbose style (all authors for 5 references) and at another place in the document I need all entries as compressed as possible (about 200-300 references).

So I currently I employed style=numeric-comp and maxnames=1. The drawback is that the maxnames options are global only options since biblatex 1.6. (Currently I use biblatex 1.7)

So how do I render a subset in verbose style and the rest in compressed style?

Answer 1

You can use

\makeatletter
\numdef\blx@maxbibnames{99}
\makeatother

\printbibliography

\makeatletter
\numdef\blx@maxbibnames{1}
\makeatother

\printbibliography

The line \numdef\blx@maxbibnames{x} is the command executed by the option maxnames=x. Thus in the first case, it will print 99 names before switching to et al, in the second case, it will do the same but after the first one.