Changing default Add Book behavior - Comments?

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by guyanonymous

RE: merge -> that's how I considered it.

Perhaps whichever title you right click upon is the one they get merged into?

Whenever possible, I try to reuse working code Kovid has already written. When editing metadata, If you select multiple individual books, then choose the edit metadata individually option, it opens them in the order you selected them.

That means there is already code in there that will handle the books in a defined order, based on selection order. All I would have to do is add a "Merge" option, then process them in a way that's similar to what I've already written (put all books in the first record), then delete all but the first book.

The main problem I have with this is the potential for inadvertent loss of books. I wouldn't want someone to select the entire database, select merge and find they've got only one book left! I was thinking there should be a limit to the number of books being merged (no more than 15?) or a warning when a limit is exceeded.

There should at least be a list of books about to be merged, with a confirmation dialog. (Another bit of code Kovid already has written that I can steal - see the Duplicates list in the Add book dialog.)

I've got lots of books with similar author names, that need merging. That means people would want merger of non-identical author named books. The same applies to title differences. To be useful, it needs to merge very different author/title, so I don't see much protection that can be applied by checking the author/title.

Last, I was trying to decide what would be done with multiple formats. If 3 .pdf files are being merged into a record that already has a .pdf, which one do you keep? The code described above deals with this issue, too. The last one processed is the one that is kept, so I assume the same would make sense.

Feel free to comment.

[guyanonymous]

Perhaps it could come up with a dialogue asking you:

a) new title
b) new author
c) tags/series info etc.

And put all of the books into a NEW book entry (####) rather than into a pre-existing one.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by guyanonymous

Perhaps it could come up with a dialogue asking you:

a) new title
b) new author
c) tags/series info etc.

And put all of the books into a NEW book entry (####) rather than into a pre-existing one.

That's a good idea for a 2nd option: "Merge into NEW book."
It could go with "Merge into First selected book"

I wouldn't want to have to enter that info each time, if there was a way to avoid it. The question remains about what you do with the books that have been merged - delete them automatically or require the user to manually delete the leftovers.

I also thought about automatically saving the merged books with the Save Books settings before merger. That would protect them, but would slow things down and require more cleanup of the disk after using Merge.

[guyanonymous]

Could you be presented, then, with a list of all books about to be merged?

This have similar formats pairs, show file sizes etc.

You would then, in the case of conflicts (?) have to select the file in each format you choose to keep.

Feels complicated....

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by guyanonymous

Could you be presented, then, with a list of all books about to be merged?

This have similar formats pairs, show file sizes etc.

You would then, in the case of conflicts (?) have to select the file in each format you choose to keep.

Feels complicated....

Yeah, probably too complicated.