[GUI Plugin] Quality Check

[DMee]

Originally Posted by Hoods7070

You can. The answer is because my workflow is to insert the book title and author into a jacket. Books come with varying FN/LNs. So before I add a jacket, the author name is put into FN/LN if necessary. After the jacket has been added, I revert the author name to LN/FN - the order I prefer on my HDD.

At the moment, because I am replacing hundreds of lost tags/comments, my database, as represented in the Calibre booklist columns, has predominantly LN/FN. Although the jacket data are still IN my books, they have vanished from my book list. This means I am having to replace them in the booklist. To ensure uniformity, I am also replacing the jackets. I did ask the question in a separate thread and it seemed there was no way to automate this process. Any suggestions would be gratefully received.

OK, conventionally the Authors field would be FN LN, meaning the Author Sorts field would be LN,FN

Can't you just use whichever of these fields presents the data in the correct format for whatever task you're attempting.

[eschwartz]

Again, why not just change Line 19 of the template.xhtml from

<td class="cbj_author" colspan="2">{author}</td>

to

<td class="cbj_author" colspan="2">{author_sort}</td>

It seems as though you are only switching to LN, FN in order to replace that chunk right there.

[Hoods7070]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Again, why not just change Line 19 of the template.xhtml from

<td class="cbj_author" colspan="2">{author}</td>

to

<td class="cbj_author" colspan="2">{author_sort}</td>

It seems as though you are only switching to LN, FN in order to replace that chunk right there.

Thanks @eschwartz and @DMee.

I am obviously being dense here, so bear with me. I fiddle with templates etc. without any in depth knowledge of html.

To reiterate, what I want is:

Desired booklist sort: LASTNAME, comma, FIRSTNAME
Desired jacket view in epub itself: author FN space LASTNAME

For any sorting of the author FN/LN order to be remotely meaningful, the entire selection of books HAS to be uniform to start with - i.e. all FN/LN, or vice versa. Otherwise you are simply reversing their order. Hence my first using the plugin to select individual books within the selected book range that are showing as LN/FN to change them to FN/LN. After inserting the jacket, I use the plugin to revert the entire selection of books to LN/FN.

The whole point here really is that there is no standard for metadata as yet, and books come with varying order of FN/LN, and my entire database is inconsistent at the moment.

With or without "sort" added in the template, the jacket created by Modify epub defaults to whatever is in the booklist view.

My tiny brain says for any sort to do anything in any database it needs to recognize delimiters of some sort. Therefore, within the Calibre column/field the comma between author FN/LN becomes a secondary delimiter.

FWIW, at my end, inserting _sort into line 19 of the original Calibre template removes the author field from the jacket entirely in the jacket ....

I hope any of this makes sense. I am utterly confused!!

[DMee]

OK, what's confusing everyone I think is why you are swapping the FN LN back again.

What you need to do is decide how you want every Author to show (usually FN LN), when doing this make sure that Author_Sort is correctly redone to LN, FN

Then you use whichever field you need to produce the correct output

Quality Check Plugin
- Check Metadata -> authors with commas
- Fix -> FN LN <--> LN, FN

That should get every author correct

Then select any book, CTRL-A to select all books
Edit Metadata on Toolbar
Tick Automatically set Author Sort at top

Then everything should be correct and you're good to go

[eschwartz]

Ahah! I thought you were doing it the other way around...

You can use a custom column called #author_fn_ln which evaluates to the template:

program:

swap_around_comma(field('author'))

[Hoods7070]

Originally Posted by DMee

OK, what's confusing everyone I think is why you are swapping the FN LN back again.

What you need to do is decide how you want every Author to show (usually FN LN), when doing this make sure that Author_Sort is correctly redone to LN, FN

Then you use whichever field you need to produce the correct output

Quality Check Plugin
- Check Metadata -> authors with commas
- Fix -> FN LN <--> LN, FN

That should get every author correct

Then select any book, CTRL-A to select all books
Edit Metadata on Toolbar
Tick Automatically set Author Sort at top

Then everything should be correct and you're good to go

Thanks for some good suggestions. The comma checker is one I had missed.

As for "why" I do ANYTHING I do - I am beyond anal about anything on my computers. When I've exhausted my own minute brain resources I reluctantly ask for help. So thanks for all yours.

[Hoods7070]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Ahah! I thought you were doing it the other way around...

You can use a custom column called #author_fn_ln which evaluates to the template:

program:

swap_around_comma(field('author'))

Now this sounds very useful! Can you walk me through the choices on the custom column screen please? I've never done something like this and it's not immediately obvious to me what to choose or where to add your line of code. TIA. I am beginning to feel irrationally optimistic!

[eschwartz]

Just insert your lookup name and human-readable name, then select type "column built from other columns". Copy-paste my code into the template box.

You can edit a custom column's template by trying to edit any ebook's cell in the library view. Instead of editing the field it will pop up the template editor.

[Hoods7070]

Thanks for that, although I must still be missing something. However, don't worry about it further.

While this discussion has been going on I have gradually edited FN/LN my entire library the "hard" (ie slow plugin) way so from now on I will only be dealing with one or two books periodically as I buy new ones so speed issues won't BE issues.

To conclude the thread: there is no question that there is some major issue with this module of GUI PI Quality Check, albeit only for me. Every single other fix/check in that same plugin works exactly as and as fast as I'd expect it to. Swap FN/LN continues to be ridiculous to the point of stalling my entire system - i.e. can't multitask whatsoever when it's running, not even run my browser - and throwing up errors if I choose too many books (more than 20 or so) in a list selected using (say) check series gaps. It **sounds** like a RAM issue, but it can't be when everything else which is used for doing tasks just as complex in terms of database processing, including multitasking with 3-4 big programs inc Calibre running, works just fine. Anyway, I am clearly flogging a dead horse at this point so I will call it a day. One or two books at a time? I can live with it.

Thanks to everyone for suggestions and input. Much appreciated!

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Hoods7070

Thanks for that, although I must still be missing something. However, don't worry about it further.

While this discussion has been going on I have gradually edited FN/LN my entire library the "hard" (ie slow plugin) way so from now on I will only be dealing with one or two books periodically as I buy new ones so speed issues won't BE issues.

To conclude the thread: there is no question that there is some major issue with this module of GUI PI Quality Check, albeit only for me. Every single other fix/check in that same plugin works exactly as and as fast as I'd expect it to. Swap FN/LN continues to be ridiculous to the point of stalling my entire system - i.e. can't multitask whatsoever when it's running, not even run my browser - and throwing up errors if I choose too many books (more than 20 or so) in a list selected using (say) check series gaps. It **sounds** like a RAM issue, but it can't be when everything else which is used for doing tasks just as complex in terms of database processing, including multitasking with 3-4 big programs inc Calibre running, works just fine. Anyway, I am clearly flogging a dead horse at this point so I will call it a day. One or two books at a time? I can live with it.

Thanks to everyone for suggestions and input. Much appreciated!

Renaming an Author is disk intensive.
The library files titles in the Authors folder

Flip the name and a New folder is created:
Each Book is moved and the DB updated.
Repeats until completed
finally the old (now empty) folder is discarded

[BetterRed]

@theducks

But - I used QC to swap FN and LN on my 7000+ book media library (612GB, repeat 612GB) - it took a few seconds. That was on an NTFS compressed, indexed, AV active, 2TB, SATA 2, drive, on a 6GB i5.

The same library takes about 2.5 hours to backup to an external USB 3.0 drive (which is faster than the internal SATA2 - same disks, 2TB WD Caviar Black).

Why the difference - the renaming, moving & deleting is done within the NTFS Master File Table (MFT), which is preallocated (and usually contiguous) space, and it operates like a database, in that 'records' don't have to be written to sector boundaries.

BR

[theducks]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@theducks

But - I used QC to swap FN and LN on my 7000+ book media library (612GB, repeat 612GB) - it took a few seconds. That was on an NTFS compressed, indexed, AV active, 2TB, SATA 2, drive, on a 6GB i5.

The same library takes about 2.5 hours to backup to an external USB 3.0 drive (which is faster than the internal SATA2 - same disks, 2TB WD Caviar Black).

Why the difference - the renaming, moving & deleting is done within the NTFS Master File Table (MFT), which is preallocated (and usually contiguous) space, and it operates like a database, in that 'records' don't have to be written to sector boundaries.

BR

You have top-o-the-line equipment

My drive is SATA2 but my MB is only SATA(1) Most renames still only take seconds.

My backup Sata WD Green 1T (in a USB/SATA case) has dead folder issues that W7 or Linux does not seem to be able to repair

[eschwartz]

Or put more simply -- you are using a filesystem format which supports hardlinking which allows the files to be moved without rewriting the entire file to disk and then deleting the old copy.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Hoods7070

Thanks for that, although I must still be missing something. However, don't worry about it further.

What did you try doing, and which part are you getting stuck on?

[DMee]

Originally Posted by Hoods7070

To conclude the thread: there is no question that there is some major issue with this module of GUI PI Quality Check, albeit only for me. Every single other fix/check in that same plugin works exactly as and as fast as I'd expect it to. Swap FN/LN continues to be ridiculous to the point of stalling my entire system - i.e. can't multitask whatsoever when it's running, not even run my browser - and throwing up errors if I choose too many books (more than 20 or so) in a list selected using (say) check series gaps. It **sounds** like a RAM issue, but it can't be when everything else which is used for doing tasks just as complex in terms of database processing, including multitasking with 3-4 big programs inc Calibre running, works just fine. Anyway, I am clearly flogging a dead horse at this point so I will call it a day. One or two books at a time? I can live with it.

What errors does selecting a lot of books produce?

Just a thought - you're not storing your books in DropBox are you? (or similar)