[Starson17]

Recently a user of the new Multiple Library features (and specifically the Copy to Library feature) posted a bug report stating that it did not honor the option "If books with similar authors and titles found, merge the new files automatically." I typically refer to this as the "autosort/automerge" option.

The bug report was accurate - setting that option had no effect on Copy to Library operations. When I wrote it, multiple libraries and the Copy to Library option were not around. The purpose of that option was to improve the 'Add book' process by recognizing when you are trying to add a new format of an existing book and automatically sort it into the existing book record (which usually already has lots of lovely metadata)

Kovid passed the bug report to me, and although I don't use multiple libraries, it made sense to have the autosort/automerge operate during a "Copy to Library" operation. New code has recently been added to the trunk to do this (for those who run from source) (And Kovid - if you read this, yes, all of your improvements to my code passed all my tests and the new code seems to work great.)

The new code does exactly what the autosort/automerge option did - namely when the author matches exactly and the title is similar enough to an existing book in the destination library, it puts any new format(s) found in the source library into the existing record in the destination library.

The autosort/automerge option only deals with two items of metadata - author and title. That was fine when doing an "Add Book."

However, when doing a "Copy to Library" it's entirely possible that the source Library has more metadata than the destination library. If the destination library has no matching book, then the entire record from the source library is copied over, with all the metadata.

However, if you have a minimal record in the destination library (only basic metadata) and you Copy over a book, the metadata in the Source Library will not go with it, only the formats will move.

I also wrote the Merge code, which merges two book records. The Copy to Library function is a bit like both chunks of code when the same book is in both libraries. It's adding formats to existing records (like the autosort/automerge option) and it could coordinate or Merge metadata from the two records back and forth.

So, at last we've arrived at my question for those who use multiple libraries. In addition to autosorting/automerging, should the "Copy to Library" function perform the same function as "Merge-Keep others" when the autosort/automerge option is on? Do you want metadata from the source library to fill in blank metadata for the matching book in the destination library?

Would you go even further - should it do a reverse merge where metadata in the destination library gets brought back into the source library to fill in any blanks in the metadata there?