[meme]

Originally Posted by Nyssa

What is the proper procedure for deleting a collection?

Whatever works

I finished a series I was reading, so I selected them in Calibre and chose to delete them from the device, thinking that the next time I ran the collection plugin, the collection would be deleted as well. Instead, the collection remained, showed "0" books and its change message was "None (preserve Kindle-only is True)", which should not be the case.

Since you deleted the books from the Kindle, when the plugin scans all the Calibre books on the Kindle it doesn't find any books on the Kindle in that Series/Collection anymore - so it thinks Calibre doesn't know anything about that Collection so its treated as Kindle only.

I then went into "Edit Collections" and saw "Internal Kindle Files" where the books would normally be. So I added the books back to the Kindle, so that I wouldn't mess anything up.
What should I do in the future, should I want the collection manager to delete a collection?

The internal kindle file indicates book's in the collection file that don't have a file on the Kindle (which could be internal dictionaries or book files you deleted). You can use Edit Collections to unselect those books from the collection to safely remove them from the collection. You can also just select the '-' button to delete the collection from the Kindle.

Also, what happens if a collection no longer meets the chosen criteria?
I have it set up to only create collections for all Authors and/or Series with a minimum of 3 books. What will happen if I choose to remove one of the books, leaving only 2?

If a collection no longer meets the chosen criteria in the Customization settings (e.g. 2 books instead of a minimum of 3, doesn't match the patterns, isn't selected), then it is ignored by the plugin. The plugin will treat the collection as Kindle-managed and it will leave it on the Kindle (if you have preserve Kindle-only checked)


So far I've mainly been looking at adding collections to the Kindle. Deleting is another issue and the original approach I took was to just leave the collections there to avoid deleting them by mistake and let you use Edit Collections to clean them up. It may be necessary to change this and I need to consider the options.

If a collection name is ignored (or not included) (after any renaming), then I'll have the plugin ignore it completely as it does now and treat the collection as Kindle-only. That means it won't create/modify/delete the collection.

I think Minimum is a special setting. So it probably should be treated differently than ignore/include. I think the approach will be if a collection of books meets the minimum, create it. If a collection exists and is under the minimum but >0 then delete it. The issue is if the collection has 0 books.

If a collection has 0 books then at the moment the collection is ignored and treated as Kindle only. This is because I only collect collection names from books that are on the Kindle. If I change this, then I need to look at every possible collection name (ie look at every book in Calibre, not just the ones on your device) and I'll have to be careful about creating collections only for books actually on the Kindle. I would then delete any collections with matching names from the Kindle with 0 books or books under the minimum. This might mean changing the Create/Delete options on the Customization. It seems doable but I'll have to test it out.