Author Topic: referring to old "lots of suggestions"  (Read 4337 times)

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Offline Anson

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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:


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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.

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.