Help with shelves

[Chocky]

Originally Posted by chaley

As I said before, I think you want to put #myshelves into the Kobo collections box. Do that. If it doesn't work then post

• An image of the Kobo dialog showing the collections box.
• An image of the #myshelves column definition dialog.
• An image of the Edit Metadata dialog showing the contents of #myshelves for some book.
• An image of the "Sending books to device" preferences dialog showing what "Metadata management" is set to.
• A copy of the calibre debug log showing the Kobo connection. To get the debug log:
  1. Start calibre.
  2. Click on the down arrow next to the Preferences button
  3. Choose "Restart in debug mode".
  4. Wait for calibre to restart.
  5. Connect your Kobo.
  6. Wait for the connection process to finish.
  7. Disconnect your Kobo.
  8. Close calibre.
  9. Post the entire log that appears in a dialog.

If you followed the directions and set Metadata Management to "Automatic" then the collections are updated every time the Kobo is connected to calibre.

Thank you for all the help, and I'll get back to it later.

Having spent an hour putting back all of my "collections" using #myshelves" in the lookup field and "Collections" as the column name and it not working as there were no "Collections" on the Kobo, (management set to automatic), then deleting the column and trying "series" in the lookup field, and that not working and deleting the column again, I need a rest...

I'm sure I didn't have this much trouble when I first did it, I just can't seem to find a simple "Do this" type thing when searching for how to add a column for collections, and I've the same problem with percentage read as well.

Having had my data disk go AWOL sorting out my PC has been a bit of a nightmare over the past few days. Luckily I do back up my data, but some stuff just wouldn't work when I copied the backup to my Data disk.

[Chocky]

At least I've sorted out the %age read column....

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Chocky

So is this correct if I want to have the collections I choose in Calibre to be on my Kobo Glo HD?

In your image, the lookup name should be myshelves. The # is needed elsewhere to refer to a custom column.

[DNSB]

• the column was created using myshelves as the lookup name (since it is a custom column, you will need to use #myshelves as the name when referring to the column). The human readable name can be Collections.
• edited the metadata for a few books and added the collection(s) you want them to show in in the collections box on the second page of the metadata editor.
• added the column names in the Collections tab (second tab for the Kobo Touch/Kobo Touch Extended driver configuration)
• connected your Kobo and made sure the metadata was updated

Also, after configuring the collections column, did you try reading the collections/shelves from the device using the Kobo Utilities plugin? This should be able to copy the on-device collections to your new Collections/#myshelves column.

One other item is that the column is only created in the active library. Easiest was to copy it to other libraries (if you have more that one) is to copy a book to the other library.

Series was popular before Kobo started showing series information. It will automagically put books into collections based on the series name.

[theducks]

#myshelves is a lookup name. Do you have a custom column with that lookup name? (I assume this was not a special trigger written into the plugin)

[DNSB]

Minor nit is that when you create a custom column, the lookup name is not prefixed with #. Though after creation the lookup will have the # added to it. If you try creating the lookup name with the prepended #, it will be removed.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Minor nit is that when you create a custom column, the lookup name is not prefixed with #. Though after creation the lookup will have the # added to it. If you try creating the lookup name with the prepended #, it will be removed.

FWIW: this is because when the code was written many years ago we wanted to be able to change the prefix for a custom field lookup name. That is why the field_metadata has the attribute 'custom_field_prefix'. As it turned out we never changed it.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by chaley

FWIW: this is because when the code was written many years ago we wanted to be able to change the prefix for a custom field lookup name. That is why the field_metadata has the attribute 'custom_field_prefix'. As it turned out we never changed it.

Thanks for the information. I was curious about why it was done that way.