Combining child genres from different parents
 

OK, once again I searched through Calibre options, this forum and the Internet and found no solution. Here is the problem:

Let's say I have a sci-fi novel and a sci-fi short story in my collection. In my custom #genre column I classify them as Novel.Sci-fi and Short Story.Sci-fi respectively. This creates the following hierarchy in my Tag Browser:

• Novel
  • Sci-fi
• Short Story
  • Sci-fi

The problem is Calibre treats both Sci-fi child items as two different genres and as a result shows only one book in each:

• Novel 1
  • Sci-fi 1
• Short Story 1
  • Sci-fi 1

instead of the more desirable:

• Novel 1
  • Sci-fi 2
• Short Story 1
  • Sci-fi 2

This is understandable, considering how the hierarchy is created, but is there a way around it? Please mind, I'm using Calibre v3.48.

You could just not group the tags hierarchically. Have three tags, Novel, Short story, and Sci-fi. Apply multiple to each book as needed. A hierarchy is best reserved for sub genres.

Another choice would be to use word count to decide if the book is a novel or short story. There are fairly well agreed numbers for these available on the web.

I have hierarchical tags for length (ie length.short) and tag genre separately.

I have a composite column that pulls the hierarchical entries from Tags, then splits and dedups them. Although intended to make the details pane look a bit neater, it has an extra effect that clicking on "Dogs" will show results from both Fiction.Animals.Dogs and Nonfiction.Animals.Dogs.

While my own template code is heavily customized for my own (very exacting and unreasonable) standards, there's a few examples here that do the same thing: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=168718

Thank you for all the suggestions. I ended up separating things into genres and subgenres, with novels, shorts stories, poems etc. classified as genres and the more thematic categories, like fantasy, sci-fi or horror being treated as subgenres.