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Messages - Anson

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21
Feature Suggestions / Re: What PVD is missing is...
« on: October 08, 2009, 12:50:06 pm »
Quote from: rick.ca on October 07, 2009, 09:22:20 pm
No, it doesn't. Those are "seen" and "not on HDD."

you deleted the quote from nostra which i was referring to (where he only spoke of the "seen" and "wish" fields and not a "not on HDD" field). since nostra named the checkbox "wish" and named the corresponding filters "owned", i think he intended to use only that field and not also look at other fields like file path, and thus my original comment still stands.

your suggestion for a workaround (see below why i don't call it a solution) to use the file path and corresponding filters is very enlightening and shows another method to use because of exactly that problem that the "wish=notowned" field is not good enough for that pupose. it even caused to show up and clarify several of the misunderstandings related to these fields. thanks!

btw: when searching, I found a few partial lists from old versions in connection with plugins and referring to fields as numbers etc. is there some current list of all standard fieldnames and their types? (maybe even with a short info about restrictions like size of short text and long text, etc. or does PVD only use some default field types which i should look up at the firebird site)

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It seems your misunderstanding is connected with...
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Or does PVD assume all movies to be on any drive, and thus all movies which are not on a harddrive are automatically on a removable drive ?
As you quoted me...
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Contrary to what the caption implies, this filter is simply triggered by something being in the file path field.
All of the filters are of the form true/false/ignore one particular attribute. In this case, the attribute is the existence of a file path, not specifically a HDD or removable media path.

too bad that the menu options don't use the proper words to describe what is filtered and we needed your explanation what really would be meant.
When i get to reading DVD and file info for my collection, i would have to filter "files on harddisk" to find scanned files on my removable USB drives or DVDR, and filter "files on removable media" to find which files from my harddisk i didn't scan yet and/or which movies i don't own ? ... what a confusion :-(

is this translation of the filters correct now ?
- not owned = wished
- owned = not wished (including movies i hate and never will own)
- files on harddisk = files exist and have been scanned
- files on removable media = movie not owned or not scanned yet

As the wording currently is, i had thought it to be some help for playing movies: movies on harddisk are always available, while you need to get and insert/mount removable media first to watch movies on them, but i assumed for both types that they already had been scanned. A functionality like this would be a real nice feature suggestion for future versions.


since you (almost? only?) have movies on harddisk and probably even with proper original titles, it is easy for you to scan them, but when i am forced to scan all DVDs i buy or have bought it costs a lot of time and has very "mixed" results since PVD is no DVD management software but only movie management software which doesn't handle the original DVD's filenames too well when i shall associate them with specific movies, especially when having a multi-disc set with several DVD for a single movie and/or having additional movies on the same DVD (eg makingof, documentaries, additional short films, etc which even have entries in the IMDB, or trailers etc which have no such entries). Also scanning files will not be easy for me since i mostly have used the titles as they appeared on TV, thus being localized (in the best case maybe AKA titles) instead of original titles, and always are missing the year.
feature suggestion (many other people already suggested this too): the ability of PVD to rename files according to some pattern from the database, eg "otitle (year) [title]" so that i can better scan the files if i move them etc.

I now would be able to write any dummy text (like "DVD" or "DVDR") in that filepath field to use the filter without scanning the media, but instead rather will use my own custom fields for remembering what parts i still have to see and what kind of wishes i have. it is the same amount of work to edit each record, gives me more info, and also will save me from future problems when standard fields like the filepath might be overwritten with new info.

ps: while searching for something and not finding it, i found some other random info.
since the other post is old, i am saying my thanks for that hint here :-)
Quote from: rick.ca on November 02, 2008, 04:01:27 am
URL's can point anywhere, including your hard drive. The program allows you to put URL in the description and comment fields by right-clicking and choosing Create Hyperlink (and link type = URL). All that does is enter <link url="[value]">[text]</link>. If you enter [value] = file:\\\c:\path to trailers\title trailer.avi and [text] = Trailer, you'll have a link that will play the trailer in your associated media player.

the idea of rightclicking fields didn't occur to me before, but now i will be able to do lots of useful, stupid and crazy things with those links which can not only be used in comments and description, but also in the tagline and most of all generally can be generated in any memo fields, including custom fields !
- linking to other websites which specialize in (localized) TV series info
- linking to my own txt files where i stored additional info on series
- links inside the database, eg when one movie is released on a disk together with another
- much much more

and while i started rightclicking fields, i discovered that there is LOTS more to discover in PVD, eg the ability to modify movie connections, and while doing so, the "add new movie" ("select a movie") dialog starts to make much more sense :-)

22
Feature Suggestions / referring to old "lots of suggestions"
« on: October 07, 2009, 01:01:53 pm »

This post is support referring to old "lots of suggestions" from summer 2008:

Quote from: Dadeo on June 10, 2008, 07:48:12 am
Quote from: rick.ca on June 10, 2008, 08:17:46 pm
Quote from: nostra on June 11, 2008, 12:46:10 pm

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  • 2. TV Series Season Data - is it possible to have a record for each Season?
  • 2. This would be nice. ... And there are situations when the only complete information available is for a whole season.
  • 2. Already in my TODO list

I will find this feature most useful for next Xmas, to keep track of which season boxes I already have, which season boxes to put on wish lists for relatives, where i will store the new DVDs from them, etc.

I could simply duplicate the main season record and edit the original title and/or localized titles to include the season, but that would result either in problems with duplicates eg on "compact database", or i wouldn't be able to download and update episode data easily (title(year) wouldn't be correct any longer, and it would require lots of manual work afterwards).

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  • 6. Find/Replace, Global Changes - Could there be some way to make global changes to data?
  • 6. There is a Multiple Movies Editor—just select multiple items (movies or episodes) before selecting Edit.
  • 6. There is already a Multiple movies editor as rick said, you can also change list values for all records in Tools -> Preferences -> Lists

At first sight, the Multiple Movies Editor looks very nice, but it includes few fields only, and most of all it includes none of my custom fields.

thanks for this hint, i had forgotten that i once saw the rename option; but:
The editing options in Tools -> Preferences -> Lists look nice too, but also there, my custom select fields are not included

just tested: renaming a list value not only renames the value but also merges it with another identical value, just like it should be when the set of values is intended to be a unique list of values. The advantage is that correcting "disney" to look like "Disney" would not create two values of "Disney".
But there is no warning when accidentally renaming a value to another existing value, immediately and quietly merging the two and making it impossible to undo later since the distiction between the two is lost. Currently it also is not possible to rename/merge more than a single value at the same time without getting a database error about requiring unique keys.

Quote from: rick.ca on June 12, 2008, 11:48:08 pm
If Multiple Movie Edit doesn't help (because it doesn't include the field you need to change), consider preparing an import file with just the corrected information (i.e., title, year, corrected data) and import that. I'm not sure this works for just deleting unwanted data—a null import field may be ignored, leaving the unwanted data intact.

Best method to do such and any other larger changes and/or merges of list values might be to export and reimport data, which leads to the next point:

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  • 8. Import/Export - ... I find it cumbersome to have to go to Preferences every time. Also, when selecting fields I would love a button to select/deselect all fields, and the ability to double click a field and have it added to/removed from the list.  When Importing it would be so helpful to have PDB read the header line of the file to make it easier for mapping fields.
  • 8. I agree, having to configure an export template is a pain; it would be nice (and less error-prone) it there were at least a way select from available fields. Also, it would be nice if import configuration took a shot at automatically matching import fields to existing fields, then let the user modify the mapping.
  • 8. I will consider improving export/import configuration

As soon as people understand how to select the fields for CSV-import, there should be no big problems except that depending on the intended purpose, all fields have to be cleared and set up differently each time. For the export, setting up different combinations of fields is even more trouble and thus it would be nice to have almost exactly the same dialog as for import, simply selecting fields from a list and selecting the characters for delimiter and text qualifier. The export function then would be able to write a proper header, and also to automatically convert values if needed (putting text qualifiers around strings which include the delimiter or CRLF, doubling the text qualifiers inside those strings, etc)
I believe that those conversion problems currently are solved only by simply replacing the problematic chars in the options of the export template and thus not allowing for text qualifiers, delimiters or CRLF to be included in exported values at all ?

When export and import are done to modify some values and reimport them later, the feature of automatically matching fieldnames in the header would be very helpful: export writes them, and import could use them with 100% accuracy. As a safeguard or when some headerfields don't match, the recognized fields could at least be used as a default to start matching the fields in the current dialog.


To use this export/edit/reimport (which rick suggested above) for all cases, other features would have to be added too, so that an exported and edited list of CSV-records will be read correctly to update exactly the records which were exported and no other records with the same title or title(year), and also so that it can be used to change the title or year of existing records.
But even if not for all cases, the above improvements to export (easier field selection and no more or at least easier templates) and import (automatic field selection) would be huge improvements.

23
Feature Suggestions / Re: What PVD is missing is...
« on: October 07, 2009, 10:09:16 am »
Quote from: nostra on July 04, 2009, 01:28:46 pm
I will not add a new checkbox field (unless there is smth very important to solve with it).

true and reasonable

at first, i had wished for several more fields myself, but always having a hundred different checkboxes and other fields which somebody would like to have, would be really bad for all other people who only get a screen full of unused fields.

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You use custom fields to add any number of checkboxes and achieve functionality you need. Advanced search can be used to filter by those fields.

yes, that is exactly what i do now, but the more custom fields and corresponding different advanced searches i use, the more important it will be in the future to store and recall (or whatever other method you might have for such a functionality) those searches for quick access and filtering.


Quote from: nostra on June 30, 2009, 04:03:19 pm
Quote from: korbenPL on June 30, 2009, 09:01:31 am
I use PVD to keep track of the flicks I've seen AND [then] bought.
So what's the problem? When adding a movie you check the "Seen" checkbox and "Wish" checkbox. When you buy the movie, you uncheck the "Wish" checkbox.

this ignores cases where i have seen a movie, don't own the DVD, but also don't want to buy it.
Since there are lots of other ideas about what "wish" means, I use a custom multiselect list to store info like "wish to buy collector's edition immediately", "wish to buy original DVD immediately", "wish to buy original DVD only at discount", "wish to record from TV", etc, and maybe even "wish to see in cinema" :-)

Some time ago, i read a suggestion/question whether "computed fields" would be nice. Maybe this would be another use for a computed field, if i could automatically set the standard "wish" field to true if the multiselect was not empty (but modifying standard fields probably would be too difficult and cause too many problems).
Another better use of computed fields might be to combine several other fields into one new field and then be able to sort on that field. This would solve many problems which currently exist when someone wants to sort a list eg according to year and title, or eg rating and seendate.


Quote from: rick.ca on July 04, 2009, 08:31:09 am
If you prefer a Xmas gift of substance, wish for the ability to save advanced searches to a search menu. You would then have full-blown, fully customizable "filtering" at your fingertips, instead of just one more wimpy girly filter. 8)

sounds nice, maybe even having all the userdefined searches (which really are filters, aren't they?) as an additional item in the filters menu, with two buttons on the "advanced search" dialog to "store this search as new filter" and to "overwrite an existing filter with this search" (for editing a search)


Quote from: rick.ca on June 30, 2009, 09:55:13 am
Use the "Movies on hard drives/removable drives" filter. Contrary to what the caption implies, this filter is simply triggered by something being in the file path field.

It must be a bit more complicated since there are two different options for harddrives and removable drives. Or does PVD assume all movies to be on any drive, and thus all movies which are not on a harddrive are automatically on a removable drive ?

All other filters have options to filter for "on" and "off", and for "all" which is effectively a "either on or off" ("don't care"). Since "on" and "off" are exclusive, those three options take care of every meaningful combination. But one filter is different: how can i look for movies on "harddrives OR removable media", and how can i look for "movies on NO drives"? To me it looks as if those two additional options should be easy to add to the drives-filter menu ...

24
Support / Re: When using new/open - the program ceases to react
« on: October 07, 2009, 12:47:45 am »
Quote from: Bitmap on October 06, 2009, 07:07:47 pm
When trying to open a file via the file menu - after clicking on open the menu disappears and the program locks. When I try to press anything I just hear a pling (typical fail signal). I can not even close the program down without using windows task manager. Where the program however is reported to still run - no message like "not responding".

some general hints,
independent of PVD and how this situation happened in your case ...

This looks like a typical situation on my system when using some other programs:
during the operation (in this case opening the selected file) some error happened and there is a notification in a new small window which takes precedence before the program window (a "modal window"), but because of some cicumstances it appears behind the program window or outside of the screen. Thus you are in some deadlock situation: you can't operate the program while the small window is active (which results in a "pling" when you try anyway), and you can't properly operate the small window without seeing it. Since the system sees the program as "waiting for action on the modal window", it is reported as "running".

what i try to do in similar cases:
  • look whether the main program is active (colored title bar)
  • push ESC or RETURN to confirm/abort whatever the modal window tries to tell you (without seeing it; before clicking the main window)
  • do this series of actions to move the window: ALT+space (this opens the system menu on most windows), ENTER (to activate the first menu option), move the mouse (the modal window should now be glued to the mouse and you can move it around to someplece where you can see it.
  • if this didn't work try again with ALT+space, Cursordown, ENTER (in case the system menu has move as second option instead of as first option)
  • most of the time, modal windows are opened in the center of the screen. thus i resize or move the main window before doing the critical action so that the center of the screen is not obscured by the main program window.

25
Support / Re: small problems with alphabetical sorting and with autocompletion
« on: October 04, 2009, 01:06:15 pm »
Quote from: rick.ca on October 04, 2009, 09:50:26 am
I note from the reference provided the "solution" seems to be language-specific. That suggests to me it's a lot more complicated than just modifying the code to take advantage of a new feature in Firebird that does the sorting "properly."

Each language and each country has different charsets and sort orders, and there even exist several different sort orders for german lists, eg in phone books vs. other official lists etc (eg whether spaces, hyphens and similar are counted, whether Ü becomes Ue for sorting or is sorted between U and S, etc). As long as sorting is done for one language only, it still is relatively easy, but when international movie titles are concerned which are given in many languages in a single list, all (contradicting) sort orders might apply at once. Those are the problems ...

But as long as it is used mostly eg on localized titles, the user's local language scheme might be a choice for basing the sorting on it, and even a default mapping of lowercase and uppercase might improve finding titles. I don't know about Firebird, but other systems allow a choice at least between case-significant and ignore case, or sorting according to no special charset (would sort according to the program's charset), according to an internal simple lower/uppercase merge, or according to a selection of the user (either the user's installation language or a freely selectable language).

For my purpose of not finding accidental "Disney" and "disney" at almost opposite ends of the list, any such method would do :-)


over all this talk about sorting, please don't forget that my main point should have been the problems with autocompletion:

According to what i was taught, some purposes of select lists (eg instead of using short text) should be to enable users to only use a specific set of values and to handle (select) them faster instead of typing strings slowly (this is the user's side; I won't speak of more reasons like internal management, enumeration lists, etc here). The autocompletion itself is only one (but the one nostra has chosen) of several methods for selecting values from that given set of values, and thus should not cause the set of values to be modified. And the ability to enter new values directly in that field's box (instead of having to edit the set of values in preferences or similar) is only a convenience (although an important one) to users. The fact that autocompletion in PVD is used to select existing values as well as create new ones makes it more difficult and gives lots of possibilities for problems, but nonetheless those basic principles should still apply.

Secretly modifying this set of values in any way (besides non-obviously creating new values with different case which I find highly disputable), not finding existing values and finding not-existing values defies all that and thus is a real bug in treating select lists.

While I still have mixed case in my field values and with the additional problems, i even would prefer to have no autocompletion at all (selecting values from the pulldown list instead). For me, all this is no "program stopper", but a part of the program i can't use as intended. A "feature suggestion" would only be a discussion about how to handle select boxes differently, but my first concern was that select boxes are handled correctly (either by fixing the current method or using any other method).

PS: I had written a lengthy answer to the previous 4 or 5 posts, but since the topic seems to advance a bit, I won't blow it up now here. The above was the most important, and I'll send the more lengthy reply as copy to rick and patch only

26
Support / Re: small problems with alphabetical sorting and with autocompletion
« on: October 02, 2009, 12:26:12 pm »

just like with my other post, you picked those parts which are less important, and didn't say anything about the other parts, eg what you think of autocompletion not working when it hits on "word - anything" or that it generates autocompletions like "Stephen King Kong" ... I don't want to "attack" someone or something, and that i use the program should be proof enough that i like it in general, but only commenting on some points which you find "fine as is" and not saying anything about the others, might give the impression as if nothing I wrote would have some real base for reporting.
even when i can live for now with those glitches (or eg autocompletion generating new values with different capitalization instead of selecting only existing values), shouldn't I report them to be addressed in some future versions ?


Quote from: rick.ca on October 02, 2009, 09:29:10 am
Sorting of data is done by Firebird, not the program.

I don't know Firebird, but are there no options to tell Firebird some details like numerical or alphabetical sorting, sorting by local charsets instead of ASCII/Unicode, maybe even specify a custom sorting procedure, etc ?

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The primary purpose of the program is for managing downloaded data.

including to retrieve data and look up movies, use groupings, sorting on some field, etc !?!

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For the relatively rare cases where data entry or the changing of downloaded information is required, I think the list behaviour is fine as is.

as i said in the subject line: "small problems"

i think that data entry or editing is not as rare as you think. I myself will have to edit each movie record, eg to modify the (localized) title, to add info about my sorting (like movie groups, etc) and my storage folders, and to add info on the type of media/DVD/file/etc, for a total of 15000+ fields (including 9000+ select lists) on the first 3000 movies. And that has nothing to do with list behavior, but with the autocompletion.

the normal use (looking up movies, displaying groups, etc) is related to "list behavior" and as soon as I have localized all titles, my guess would be that half of them are lowercase and half are uppercase. together with possible errors from wrong capitalization on select fields (and i wanted to use select fields instead of short text fields just to avoid typing errors), I don't consider it "fine as is", but only "can live with it"

27
Scripts and Templates / Exporting Episodes to CSV
« on: October 02, 2009, 09:48:03 am »
- it would be nice if some basic data which is required to identify an episode and additional modified data could be exported by such a template, eg series title, episode season and number, episode title, and in addition (localized) title, flags for wish and seen, and maybe a file path.

- really useful would be such an export if there would be also a corresponding import that allowed for updating the (localized) title, flags and a file path after getting the series data with a plugin (eg from IMDB; eg for creating a new partial database or just to recreate everything if i do a "readable" backup to a CSV file), but probably any import which can currently be done would be for "main entries" only and not for episodes, is this correct?

28
Support / Re: another case of "movie already might exist"
« on: October 02, 2009, 09:19:54 am »
Quote from: rick.ca on October 02, 2009, 01:48:37 am
As I pointed out to you before, you can disable the duplicate checking dialog/selection list if you don't like how that works. Personally, I find it too annoying to be of any practical use.

I agree, with one additional question:
what does PVD do when it doesn't show the dialog ?

Even when it doesn't show the dialog, it has to take some action (even if the action is to do nothing, add, skip, etc). Thus: Would PVD always add a new record, or always use an existing one, and if yes then which one ?

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there doesn't seem to be any dire consequences to simply turning the feature off an not worrying about it.
In case of creating a new record, it probably would be meaningful to always automatically create a new (duplicate) record, but on editing an existing record (like i described above), I would hate it to create duplicates automatically. Would PVD choose different default actions depending on the situation if i turn the option off?

btw: I think the option to show the dialog even was off by default, but since i didn't want to be surprised by PVD, i switched that option on on purpose. But now i am not much wiser anyway when i see that dialog.

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As you can see from this post (and the one linked to it) and nostra's response, the design issues are not straightforward and are not going to be addressed any time soon.

In those posts, there was lots of talk about creating and removing duplicates. That and our old discussion (and even some more questions i didn't dare to ask, eg about removing duplicates on database cleanup) always seem to be centered around the same question: "what is a duplicate?" and maybe even "what does duplicate refer to, duplicate movies and/or duplicate records?"
Sometimes (eg on CSV import) PVD considers same original titles as possible duplicates even when everything else (ID, year, url) differs, but in other answers i saw that original title and year would be used, etc.

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turning the feature off ....
This means, of course, you're on your own for handling duplicate titles. Essentially, that requires manually changing (or starting with) a Title arbitrarily made unique in whatever manner works for you. Once the record is created and have an IMDb URL, the Title can be changed back to something that isn't unique.

really?
then why did PVD have problems after editing a record with a duplicate title, duplicate year and unique url?
but when just using the IMDB plugin, following links to invisible records, etc, you are right: in those cases, the plugin uses the URL, unique otitle/year are no longer required, and maybe not even a unique URL.

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Your statistics prove the point these situations are rare enough there is no compelling need for the program to deal with them any differently than it already does.

- the number 3 or 4 (out of 3000, one per mille) of non-unique otitle/year pairs in my database only indicates that there doesn't need to be an emergency update to PVD. But in the long run, even a single record which would be erroneously deleted, overwritten or added over and over again (on editing, cleaning up the database, etc) is one too much.
- the number 30 (out of 3000, one per cent) of non-unique otitle/year pairs (possible future additional cases for the above 3 or 4) already is larger.
- and i would not consider a number of 170 to be small either (270 records for 100 different otitles; that is the number of times i get the "possible duplicate" dialog when importing to an empty database from a CSV file in which all records have different ID and different URL). For a first import to an empty database, i can select "add" and "don't ask again", no problem. But for updating (eg adding or changing some field by importing from CSV again) i wouldn't be able to select "update/merge/etc" and "don't ask" since for 270 records (out of 3000, nine per cent) i would need to select the proper record from the dialog even when a unique ID and unique URL is included, and in those cases, the above problem/bug appears again: ... at least the ID should be given ... And if you can never provide the ID in that dialog (i can't remember ever seeing an ID in that dialog), the empty ID field shouldn't appear in the dialog.

ps: or is that the answer to the question above? does PVD use unique ID and unique URL if the "show dialog" option is turned off? I doubt that, and if it would be true, then that dialog should include another button to "automatically decide whether to add a new record using unique ID and/or unique URL"

29
Support / small problems with alphabetical sorting and with autocompletion
« on: October 02, 2009, 06:56:04 am »

problem with alphabetical sorting

When the list of movies, actors or some grouped listing are sorted, it is done strictly according to the charset (ASCII?). This results in listing all uppercase titles first, followed by lowercase titles. While people use the complete titles without moving "The" to the end of it, and while using english titles (usually all words are capitalized), this doesn't matter much, but when there are lots of German (or french, italian, etc) titles, and/or when moving articles to the end, many titles suddenly appear at the end of the movielist instead of being alphabetically sorted together with the capitalized words. Similar also applies to special characters like "-", "'", "(", etc, and also to special local characters like äöüÄÖÜß, èéêùúû, etc which partially appear before uppercase, between upper and lowercase, and after lowercase.

It would be nice to be able (either by default or selectable by an option) to sort all special chars together at one place (either before or after all other chars), and most of all to sort chars according to the local language or in some other merged way, at least ignoring upper and lowercase, or even eg AaÀàÁáÄä together, followed by Bb, etc


problem with autocompletion

In my database, I have added several custom items, including "select list". When I want to select a value in such a list by typing the first few chars, two effects occur:

The chars i type are taken literally including uppercase and lowercase, and autocompletion only takes the rest of the string from the selection list. Since the typed chars are taken as typed but it looks as if the field was automatically filled with an existing value, I already ended up several times in unintentionally creating a new value which I couldn't easily see (because of the sorting problem, see above).
Example: A value "Disney" already exists in the selection list, but i simply type "d". Autocompletion makes "disney" from it, and when i accept, a new value is created. Sorting or grouping by this field will later cause this new value to show up at the end behind all uppercase values (A ... Disney ... Z ... disney) and the record seems to be missing in the database when i look at the "Disney" group.
It would be nice when case would also be adjusted automatically, although i recognize the problem of "how to add a new value starting with different case if a value starting with those letters already exists"
I have no perfect solution for it, but wanted to explain the small problem i have with the current situation. Maybe in the meantime, autocompletion could match the exact case only, which would require a little more carefulness (also using the shiftkey instead of "just typing"), but avoid unintentional additional values.

Another problem with autocompletion is a bit more strange:
In a custom select list, i have (amongst others) the values "Horror - King", "Stephen King", and "King Kong". And here is what the autocompletion does:
- on typing "step", I get "stephen King"
- on typing "horr", I get "horror - King"
   (both as expected, with lowercase problem: see above)
- on typing "stephen ", I get "stephen "
- on typing "horror ", I get "horror "
   (both: why is the rest no longer completed when i type the space?)
- on typing "stephen ki", I get "stephen king Kong"
   (rest is completed again, but: what kind of completion is THAT?)
   (at least i had a good laugh on Stephen's new nickname :-)
- on typing "horror - ki", I get "horror - ki"
   (rest still is no longer completed after i type space and "-",
   and it is also not even completed as above like "horror - king Kong")

Is the autocompletion done by PVD by doing some patternmatching, and the regex and stringoperations cause also unintentional matches like the "Stephen King Kong"? When i programmed something with a listbox in one of my programs, i set flags to ignore case and to alphabetically sort the list. When I type something in the editfield of that dropdownlist now, it doesn't show autocompletion, but opening the pulldown or using wheel or cursorkeys shows the first value which matches these typed chars, making it easy to use mousewheel or cursor-up/down to select an existing value (including the correct case of the characters), and the preselection of a value speeds up scrolling to the intended value, most importantly in very long lists.
Of course, this is only my personal approach in one of my programs, but for my style of working, it worked out: type a few chars (without watching for correct case), use the wheel or cursor (even a single "down" will do), and get to a correctly spelled existing value fast. For these abilities and less other problems, i would gladly sacrifice a shown autocompletion :-)


ps: another small general problem with the select lists is that after editing a record, typing a new value for a select list, and applying the changes, this value won't be considered for autocompletion on editing another record later, unless i have first clicked the arrow to pulldown the selection list at least once: The list of values seems to not be updated automatically, and i have to force such an update by showing the list manually once.

30
Support / another case of "movie already might exist"
« on: October 01, 2009, 09:35:48 pm »
Although we already talked a lot about uniqueness and the difficulties associated with it, here is just another case of "movie already might exist" which IMHO shouldn't have happened at all, and if it happened it should have dealt with a bit differently.

In my database, there are "several" movies with identical names and some of them even identical years (those are the movies which get a suffix to the year in the IMDB, like yyyy/I, yyyy/II, etc), but they all have different additional fields like a unique ID, different unique URL, several different custom fields, etc.

When I just tried to edit one such movie with a duplicate "otitle (year)" and only changed its title (localized version of the title, but otitle and year unchanged), i got that dialog once again that the title might already be existing (of course it should, since i was editing an existing movie!) and whether i wanted to add a new movie or use the existing otitle (year). The dialog only gave me two options in the list: "add" and one single movie (which one was it, the edited movie or the other?). But that was not confusing enough: the only info that the dialog gave was the name and the year (which of course are not unique and thus not good enough in this case) and the ID field was empty.
Although one might differ on everything else, at least the ID should be given since both records had an ID before editing and the edited record still had its old ID. And if you can never provide the ID in that dialog (i can't remember ever seeing an ID in that dialog), the empty ID field shouldn't appear in the dialog.
btw: what use does the ID field have anyway, if it is not used to identify a record (eg when importing an updated series of movies from CSV files)

Please improve on that "duplicate detection" feature, eg:
- don't ask which movie to update (merge?) when i edit a specific movie record and ask only when i create a new record
- fill out also the ID of the movie in that dialog and maybe give additional info to identify them
- and in general (for some future version), give some option to use additional fields like ID or URL to detect uniqueness automatically

some statistical background for the first 3000 records i imported:
- 35 records (more than 1%) with non-unique "otitle (year)" data which gets that /I /II suffix in IMDB
- from 4 of those 35, I have both versions in the database
- almost 100 non-unique "otitle"
- those 100 otitles result in something like 270 records with non-unique "otitle" (9% of the records in my database) which mostly would be unique by using year and type (series/movie) and only 3 or 4 would need additional info like /I /II
- ALL of those records would be unique when URL or ID fields would be considered
no wonder that i get lots of trouble with PVD asking me for verification of duplicates

ps: as Movie Information Skin I use "PVD Classic". It would be nice if i wouldn't have to edit the skin myself for every update to accomodate for IDs with more than only 4 digits (for visible records, I use the 7-digit IDs from the IMDB URL, and for invisible automatically generated records i let PVD assign IDs of 10000000+, but also many other people probably have more than 9999 records in the database).
Can you please make that field a bit larger as default and/or autoadjust to larger IDs ?

31
Support / Re: CTRL Shift for multiple selection
« on: September 23, 2009, 01:33:24 am »
Quote from: rick.ca on September 21, 2009, 11:19:01 pm
You must have a tired old brain like mine. I can still learn new things. But then learning anything newer than the new thing can be a problem. :-\

you are not alone, I feel the same sometimes, and Kelly Knows Something

Quote from: rick.ca on September 21, 2009, 07:46:31 pm
The program follows the Windows standard for selection. Shift-Click to select a range, and Ctrl-Click to select individual items not in sequence.

In theory, Windows has also combinations of Ctrl+shift+click ...

click to select the first item
shift+click to select a range from the first item to another item

ctrl+click to select another "first" item (out of the range)
ctrl+shift+click to select another range (outside of the first range)

when you start using ctrl+click to deselect an element in a selected range and/or start ctrl+shift+clicking after that, you can get even more combinations of effects which are difficult/lengthy to explain but sometimes worth to try out :-)

32
Support / two BUGS with SQL queries
« on: September 21, 2009, 10:04:11 am »
first bug, in advanced search:
I had defined several custom items, among them some "Select List" and some "Multiselect List".
When i try to do an advanced search "(loc1 IS NOT NULL) and (loc2 IS NOT NULL)", i get the following errorbox:
Code: [Select]
Dynamic SQL Error
SQL error code = -204
alias MOVIES CUSTOMSHORT154601265 conflicts with an alias in the same statement
Undefined name
Error Code: 249
To eliminate possible side effects from my database, upgrading the version, etc, I did the same test again with a fresh (newly created) database in v14, first adding only one field of both types, and then doing an advanced search on the empty database with the same advanced query "(loc1 IS NOT NULL) and (loc2 IS NOT NULL)". The result was the same errorbox as above (except for a different name "CUSTOMSHORT155341073")

more tests:
- changing the condition (IS NULL, = "x", contains "y") resulted in the same error.
- doing the tests with two "Select List" results in no error.
- doing the tests with two "Multiselect List" results in no error.
- changing the order "(loc2 ...) and (loc1 ...)" gives the same error again.

second bug, in displaying a grouped listing:
after i started PVD again and opened my normal database, the old grouping (context menu "group as") was lost and instead the standard grouping was used (is that a feature or a minor bug too; it would be nice if such settings would be saved and restored for each database and between PVD sessions).

The standard grouping is according to the original title's first letter, and everything seemed to be nicely grouped, including movies which start with digits and also some special chars. I could expand (click on the little "+" sign to the left of the group) groups which start with a dot (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068154/ in case someone needs such a title for testing himself), a minus, an asterisk (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092494/), but when I want to expand the group which has single apostrophes ("'", like in http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0306872/), I get an SQL error:
Code: [Select]
InitChildren
Dynamic SQL Error
SQL error code = -104
Unexpected end of command - line 1, column 376
Invalid token
Error Code: 249
when I did the same again now (a few hours later), i get no such errormessage, but the rest stays the same: the "+" in front of the folder symbol disappears, the folder symbol stays the same (with a green plus sign on it) and no details/movies from the group are listed.

33
Support / Re: Deleting from People View - according to Anson
« on: September 19, 2009, 04:19:10 am »
It seems that the problem is detected:

Quote from: Anson on September 18, 2009, 06:34:21 am
..., but it is irrelevant how we use the program normally to determine if there is some problem at all, EXCEPT if the above option would change the behaviour of PVD while deleting records.

Quote from: rick.ca on September 18, 2009, 08:37:25 am
It seems the behaviour is fundamentally different depending on the setting of Show people added from movie credits. Selecting this setting causes all invisible movies to become visible, and then the delete behaviour is as I describe above. If the setting is not selected, then, according to Anson's testing, the behaviour is analogous to how delete and ctrl-delete work for movies.

Our discussion was a bit complicated :-)
but now that we know the cause of the problems and misunderstandings, this "side-thread" about the tests probably is needed at most for reference and can be closed.


one last PS:
Quote from: rick.ca on September 18, 2009, 08:39:46 pm
To recap how people records are managed when the Show people added from movie credits is not used:
  • Updating movie records adds people as invisible records. They're invisible in the sense their only purpose is to show the person's name in the movie credits. No other information is recorded, and they're therefore hidden in People View.
  • Credit links will go to either the person's IMDb page, or their record in People View. The Click and Ctrl-Click behaviour is set at Preferences - Miscellaneous. So you have a choice if you want to see any information about the person. If you elect to view their PVD record, the link will take you to People view and make the record visible. You can then update the record to download the IMDb information. Now that the record is visible, its link colour (in the movie credits) and click behaviour will change.

movies are handled similar to the above, having lots of invisible movies from connection info like follows, spoofs, etc.

I have neither flag for "show people/movies" set (to limit data to what I want), and to not accidentally do the wrong type of click (click vs. ctrl-click) and thus make visible movies or people, i have set the options in preferences - misc:
- follow the internal link in PVD ("switch to record") with a normal click if the record is already visible,
- or with a CTRL-click when it is still invisible and would be made visible by clicking.
- follow the external link to the internet ("open in browser") with CTRL-click for available/visible records,
- or a simple click when it is invisible and would cause the record to become visible.

Now i can always normal-click on all links without accidentally making records visible,
and if i want to do something else (get to my internet source for a closer look or make invisible links visible), i always have to use CTRL while clicking.

using these settings for clicking, i also rarely have to delete (make invisible) some records for either movies or people because i didn't get the records in the first place :-)

34
Support / Re: Deleting from People View - according to Anson
« on: September 18, 2009, 06:34:21 am »
just for the people (especially mumin and nostra) who might be overwhelmed otherwise, i have moved the most important last part of this followup to the top here ...

Quote from: rick.ca on September 18, 2009, 03:29:50 am
More to the point, what is your advice to mumin, now that you have contradicted mine?

I think i agreed with you and not contradicted you on how to fix the problem of restoring a deleted people record:
Quote from: Anson on September 18, 2009, 01:02:40 am
Quote from: rick.ca on September 17, 2009, 07:30:42 pm
To fix the situation where a person has been accidentally deleted, update the movie they were previously associated with. Then update the person's record as well—that will restore them to any other movies they might have been associated with.
might work ... but depending on your method to work with people (I almost never download info for people), maybe the actor would have to be deleted again (with DEL, and NOT with CTRL+DEL) to make him invisible again, and even that would still leave lots of info in the invisible record.

all the contradictions are only related to how the problem occured in the first place and whether it always happens. And there was no talk yet about whether the "not auto-refreshing" (which btw also happens on other occasions like some editing/updating of movies etc) should be considered to be normal, only a feature, or a (minor) bug.

first and most important: mumin needs to answer nostra's question
Quote from: nostra on September 17, 2009, 03:07:10 pm
did you hold ctrl while deleting the person?
If yes, then just do not do it next time ;)
if no then I will need to take a look at the code...

second: if the answer is no, mumin might follow my tests to see whether it is only a misunderstanding because of the refresh problem or something, before nostra starts digging the code

third (and to clarify whether rick and I really got different results): you might follow my steps exactly and tell what you found, and/or describe the steps you did while testing. I will gladly follow them, trying to reproduce your problem of always immediately deleting visible records, and report whether i get the same problem.


Quote from: rick.ca on September 18, 2009, 03:29:50 am
I don't know why you should so readily assume otherwise, but the behaviour I described is exactly as I described it.

you wrote:
- Deleting people doesn't just make them invisible, it actually deletes the record.

and i did some tests and found that on my installation,
- people are not always deleted completely, but only when they already were invisible or ctrl-del is used, and
- records were sometimes not shown temporarily although they really were not deleted.

since this seemed to contradict each other, i listed more details under wich conditions people were deleted on my system and under which conditions they were not, and which additional facts might make someone believe that records were visible or invisible although they had a different state.
In doing so, I also tried describing what i consider to be a bug (the refresh problem) since that might mislead people to think something happened or didn't happen which really didn't happen, causing them to mess up the database themselves.

Quote
It has nothing to do with failing to refresh the display. So why do you suppose we're observing different behaviour?

if you observe that records are always deleted and i observe that they are only deleted depending on some conditions, it is different and not only supposed, isn't it ?

to find out what might cause the differences, we would have to compare all our little differences in setup or what we did differently while testing. concerning my tests: did you do the same test which i described step by step ?
did you "download info on people with IMDB plugin" for some (grey or white) actor, refresh the display, then select the white record and push DEL (without holding control), confirm the deletion, no longer see the record in the list, refresh the display again and then see the record again? I did this at least 8-10 times for different and the same actors and always found that they were not deleted but only made invisible (with detailed info still intact).
If you did the same and found that always "Deleting people doesn't just make them invisible, it actually deletes the record", we are in trouble like nostra said.

Quote
What, exactly, do you mean by "i don't auto-download people's info"?
Have you selected Show people added from movie credits?
If not, you comments may not be relevant to the way most of us the program.

yes, i was speaking of exactly that option, but no, i have deselected it.
To limit the size of downloads and of the database and because i mostly want to use PVD not as replacement for using IMDB, but only to keep track offline of which DVDs I own, which movies i recorded from TV, what might be items for a wishlist, where i put them all and what i haven't watched yet, I have deselected all those additional options to Show people added from movie credits and Show movies added from Filmography. For now, it's good enough for me to have filmographies of those few actors or directors where i try to collect a set of their best movies and look everything else up on the web (if i start browsing people, i might end up anyplace in IMDB :-)

When we both do the same ("downloading people info" and "deleting people records"; you do it always and i did it just for this test) and for one of us records are always deleted but not for the other, we might see the same problem differently often, but it is irrelevant how we use the program normally to determine if there is some problem at all, EXCEPT if the above option would change the behaviour of PVD while deleting records.

35
Support / Re: Deleting from People View - according to Anson
« on: September 18, 2009, 01:02:40 am »
Quote from: rick.ca on September 17, 2009, 07:30:42 pm
Deleting people doesn't just make them invisible, it actually deletes the record.

NO: I just tested it on a new database with v0.9.9.13, and besides a problem with refresh not working automatically, it worked as expected, if i remember exactly which state the entries have (invisible entries shown, or having really visible entries):

- adding two movies only shows grey actors in the people list since i don't auto-download people's info, and only one or both of the movies are shown for them. To see the actors, i have set the filter to show all people including grey invisible actors.
- when i delete one such grey actor, the record is removed completely since it is already an invisible record.

- downloading people's info with a plugin causes the data to be loaded, but the actor still looks grey in the list until i manually refresh the list with F5 (this is at least a feature, if not a real (small, minor) bug). then the actor is shown with white background and appears also when resetting the filters to normal (only visible shown)
- (before the next step, i have set the filters back to also show invisible records)
- pushing the DEL key with one of these white actors selected first asks me the security question (with the hint to hold CTRL to completely delete the record), and then the actor is removed from the list of actors, but only until I refresh the list again with F5 (same as above: feature or bug, that i have to manually refresh?). After using F5, the actor is shown to be back on the list as grey entry, and thus it was NOT deleted completely. This is exactly what should happen {edit:} except for the fact that now even the invisible record still has all the info and not only info for the two movies like at the beginning when the actors were added invisibly with only visible movies being listed.

lessons from the above tests:
- use F5 often
- if you don't autodownload actor's info, records for people are invisible (you can see them, but only if the filter is set to show invisible records), and deleting them deletes them completely
- if an actor is visible (because of autodownload or manual update), deleting it behaves like deleting visible movies: it only makes it invisible unless CTRL is held down too.
- the actor's record will never be the same minimal record again like in the beginning, unless it is deleted completely together with many movies, and movie info for all related movies is downloaded again (see also the warning in the preferences: "these changes can not be undone easily")


Quote
This doesn't surprise me, as normally there are no "invisible" people.

hehe, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0220238/ :-)

more serious: there are also no invisible movies which you can see. But you probably autodownload all people's data when importing a movie, and THEN, there really never are "invisible" records in people view.


Quote
If a person is no longer associated with any visible movies, then it would be logical to make them invisible.

Sounds nice, but would raise another problem: users should be allowed to have actors even if none of their pictures are currently visible, eg because i just started to add movies by following a filmography (first step: create actor, second step: download actor, third and fourth steps: follow links in filmography and download movies; alternate third step when following your above logic: make the actor invisible, removing his filmography, before being able to follow links from the filmography to download movies).

Quote
Conversely, if the user "deletes" a person who is still associated with visible movies, then the record should be make invisible, not actually deleted. Deleting people should be a way of stripping a record of all the information from the record, except for the links to existing visible movies. In other words, the same behaviour as for deleting movies.

According to my tests above, it seems to be done just like you suggest.

Quote
To fix the situation where a person has been accidentally deleted, update the movie they were previously associated with. Then update the person's record as well—that will restore them to any other movies they might have been associated with.

might work ... but depending on your method to work with people (I almost never download info for people), maybe the actor would have to be deleted again (with DEL, and NOT with CTRL+DEL) to make him invisible again, and even that would still leave lots of info in the invisible record.

36
Support / Re: Adding movies, etc.
« on: September 17, 2009, 08:44:22 am »
Quote from: rick.ca on September 17, 2009, 07:53:26 am
If you have a URL, by all means use it. But the only way to do so is to add it to an existing record. Existing records, by design, must have titles.

not exactly...
you can delete titles from existing records. they only need to have a title to create them.

edit: just did an additional experiment with strange outcome:
import from CSV: only an URL field -> a new record is generated with no title and no URL

37
Support / Re: Adding movies, etc.
« on: September 17, 2009, 08:27:55 am »
Quote from: rick.ca on September 13, 2009, 05:43:34 am
What's clearly counter-intuitive is the idea of creating a record with no name. When I used the word "intuitive," the context was not just the program, but record keeping in general. I think most people can appreciate the consequences of putting a paper document in an unmarked folder and filing the folder in a random location in a filing cabinet. Why would their expectations be any different here?

it should be different because we work with computers and not with pen&paper and a physical storage. On a computer you have many options to file something and search for it besides a title, eg an advanced search for
Code: [Select]
URL IS NOT NULL
and
ORIGINAL TITLE IS NULLand then fill that data by using a plugin.

If you have a secretary in your office, it would be counter-intuitive to give him/her a note with a reference number for some document in another office, and him/her telling you that he/she can't get the info and copy it for you unless you go there first yourself and copy the title of the document to the note first, or at least write anything there which looks like a title (which later is not needed at all when retrieving the info by use of the document's reference number). It would be really blond secretaries (sorry for not being PC :-) who can't do that themselves and require the boss to give such a title just to temporarily file the note in their hand until the real document is retrieved (by ignoring that title and looking at the reference number only) and replaces all data on the note.

Quote
I think a polite warning is counter-productive in the cases where a smack in the head is called for. But I suppose that's just me. ;)

I just tried ...
- if i input all data for a movie and leave the title fields empty, the record and all the work is lost. that would be a really big smack with a hammer.
- if i already have a record, i can change everything and even delete both titles as well as year and ID, and it will still be saved! Thus: why shouldn't an (optically identical) record be saved and give a hammer-smack when i write all the info for the first time?


Quote from: patch on September 13, 2009, 07:39:41 am
It has a creation date and unique internal id so can readily be displayed and found.

although i agree with the rest of the post (see my suggestion above for searching for the record), there seems to be no unique statical internal ID which can be shown to users in any kind of way. that would be what i have looked for, but as i understood from another post, such IDs are generated some kind of dynamically by using info like title and date.


Quote from: rick.ca on September 13, 2009, 08:22:54 am
If you want to do this now, you can open a new movie record, paste in the URL and type an "X" for the title, then save and download. I don't find typing the "X" particularly demanding.

when i suggested using dummynames, you didn't like that idea, and the "X" is just that: a dummyname. In addition, using the same name "X" for all movies leads to problems, not only when importing a CSV file with a lot of URLs but also because of endless questions whether the existing entries for "XxX" and similar were meant.
That's why i had suggested in a previous post how to create dummytitles for importing URLs from a CSV: "dummytitleNNNNNNN" with NNNNNNN being the number from the IMDB URLs (of course, this is only practical when i do it automatically, eg with my new "myvovies to pvd" converter which works now :-).

Quote
The idea the program should allow a user to create a record without a name, or warn them they're attempting to do so is silly.

when i can delete the title later (i have tested that), it is silly if i can't download info including correct title without first creating a new record with any (even incorrect) title.
When accidentally forgetting to enter a required field (or even more so, when that field seems to be not so required in the end), it is common practise and politeness to not smack users with a hammer and deleting/ignoring the info they have entered correctly, but warn them instead. I consider this behavior in PVD to be a bug and not only a feature. (and i consider the fact that it is required at all to be only a featuire and not a bug)

38
Support / Re: Adding movies, etc.
« on: September 17, 2009, 06:53:50 am »
Quote from: patch on September 13, 2009, 05:22:39 am
Quote from: Anson on September 12, 2009, 05:00:41 pm
I tried creating a new record with only an URL and neither title nor original title, and it didn't work.
Agree this is counter intuitive & workarounds using dummy titles to create record without confusing PVD matching logic would just add to the confusion.

The problem is probably this "internal index and matching" which rick described somewhere above. PVD has to do something like that and probably needs either title or original title to do it, and thus can't add an url without at least one of those other two fields.

Quote
A good solution / feature request would be supporting url in "add from clip board".

That would work nicely for my purpose:
- go to the website and search for a movie
- copy the URL
- either "add URL from clipboard" or add an URL with the "new movie master"

But it also would have to take care of exactly the same problem (not having a title), and thus be no "standalone" solution without other related changes to handling records without titles and/or at least internally use a dummytitle derived from the url or something.

Since i like experiments, i once created a new record with the url as title, but that crashed the IMDB plugin (some endless searches with repeating parts of that url, etc). But maybe that could be a method to "add movies by URL" if plugins would check whether a title looks like an URL. then PVD itself wouldn't have to take care of titles too much and the work would be done by the plugin ... (just an idea; might also be total crap since i have no idea how all this big software package looks internally)

39
Support / Re: IMPawards download error
« on: September 13, 2009, 12:19:31 am »
Quote from: rick.ca on September 12, 2009, 11:12:28 pm
In the case of IMDb, I sometimes get the "take a rest" message when using the site manually, but I'm not aware of them having blocked or restricted the plugin.

I never got such "take a rest", but after using the IMDB plugin to get episode info on 8 seasons of a series without problems, the next few seasons always skipped one or two episodes with an error "page not found". After waiting a few minutes, i got the next few seasons again without problems. The same happened again at some other time of day on another series.
btw: the errorbox for "page not found" had only one button for confirmation. would it be possible to add a second button for the option to retry ?

Since the number of pages multiplies if someone also gets people info for each episode's actors, i thought it a possibly good idea to restrict oneself a bit before they implement stricter limitations, and not flood a site with requests when not necessary. Since we don't want to mirror the entire site, a little slowdown shouldn't hurt us too much.
The method for the slowdown (wait after each movie, wait after each page, wait after each file, wait some time after a burst of one minute, etc) remains to be discussed later if such kind of feature would be in the planning state.

40
Support / Re: IMPawards download error
« on: September 12, 2009, 05:32:47 pm »
Quote from: rick.ca
... downloading multiple posters in batch mode ... again after 24 hours or so ...

This question started me to think about a general problem on all imports/plugins:

when people do an update of large amounts of data, eg selecting all movies and running a plugin on them, would it be nice to do such actions more slowly by having an option to pause between queries for each movie, or even between queries for several pages/files which belong together for a single movie?

when running such an update AFK, i wouldn't care whether it takes 1 or 12 hours overnight, but it would avoid flooding a website with requests for several movies (dozens of pages and even more files) per minute, a speed which no normal user could achieve and which even for big sites might cause some burden if too many people start doing similar ...

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