User Defined Columns

[jjansen]

Hi Kovid, About six months ago you said that "user defined columns" were on your longer term To Do list. Just wanted to add my vote if you wanted help prioritizing :-) . I really have a need for two new columns. One is the column indicating that a book has been read. I know that you told someone to use TAGS but I use that for my genres. Tags are part of my folder hierarchy.

I currently keep one database from which I download to my husband's, my mother's and my ereaders. My mother and husband only want to see the books that each of them have not read (each from different subsets of my library). I am sure that lots of people have lots of things they could do if we had an additional column or two that could be filtered and used in the download hierarchy.

Here is my vote. Let me know if I am going to be pleasantly surprised any time soon. I think your solution is great...........Jackie

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by jjansen

I really have a need for two new columns. One is the column indicating that a book has been read. I know that you told someone to use TAGS but I use that for my genres. Tags are part of my folder hierarchy.

I suspect it will be a while (unless you want to start learning Python) . Are you sure tags won't work for you? What do you mean by "Tags are part of my folder hierarchy"? Do you have only one tag per book?

[jjansen]

I am just in the midst of changing my folder structure on my ereader. I use the tag field for the genre and yes some books have multiple tags i.e. "Mystery & Thrillers" and "Short Stories". I haven't figured out yet what happens if I put the tag at the top of my folder structure in Calibre for output. I wonder if this will cause my novel to be written twice if it has two tags. I would like the genre at the top level if I can do that. I am not keen on having the same book twice on my ereader. I haven't tested yet what will happen.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by jjansen

I am just in the midst of changing my folder structure on my ereader. I use the tag field for the genre and yes some books have multiple tags i.e. "Mystery & Thrillers" and "Short Stories". I haven't figured out yet what happens if I put the tag at the top of my folder structure in Calibre for output. I wonder if this will cause my novel to be written twice if it has two tags. I would like the genre at the top level if I can do that. I am not keen on having the same book twice on my ereader. I haven't tested yet what will happen.

Ereaders vary, and I don't even have an official ereader, so everything I do is via "Save to disk", but I'm reasonably confident you don't have to worry about multiple books being sent. The {tags} field is just that - a comma separated list of all tags assigned to the book. It's uncommon to use tags in your output because your directory will be \root\TagA, TagB, TagC\author_or_whatever_else_is_in_your_output_for mat_string

I'd use tags for your genres and your mother and husband's books (mom_book, husband_book )and what they've read (mom_read, husband_read) and the other tag elements automatically assigned by Calibre, like "news" for recipe-based ebooks, etc.

Say your mom wants a list of all her books, that have not been read by her, plus the news that Calibre has created. She'd use this:
tag:mom_book not tag:mom_read or tag:news

Your husband remembers he read a Mystery & Thrillers book, but can't remember the title. He wants to find it so he can see what series it's in and find the other unread books in that series. He types:
tag:husband_read tag:"Mystery & Thrillers"

You want to find all your mom's books that don't have a cover or comments so you can fetch metadata for her books. You type:
tag:mom_book cover:false comments:false

They are very flexible.