[kiwidude]

Hey Charles, thanks for the feedback again.

Originally Posted by chaley

I really like using the search restriction and the marking.

I thought you might like the marking. Awesome foresight when you added that feature to Calibre to suggest putting a dictionary in place now wasn't it?

Setting up the search restriction by hand is easy, although having it done for me would be nice.

I've just plumbed in the show all groups to do search restrictions and highlighting. It is awesome! I think there could be a few ways to go with this.

1. Drop the "Show all duplicates" menu option and make this the default behaviour, or...
2. To (just) have a persisted option on the search dialog, so the user can choose whether to display all the results as a group or to review individually, or...
3. To have it both on the dialog, and have the "Show all duplicates" menu option which act as a toggle to turn the behaviour on and off on the fly.

The menu option could come in handy because of the issues with showing duplicate exemptions discussed below, although we could just treat "next result" as a similar trigger to turn the GUI "back into" the show all duplicates mode. Thoughts?

One nit: the duplicate groups are random (it seems) in terms of title order...

That is a tough one if part of the issue is stuff like "A" and "The" prefixes being part of the reason for a title being a duplicate in the first place . There is a step in the process before I allocate the group numbers where I can sort them however I like - so what I have done just now is to sort by their fuzzy key. You would still get some "quirks", but as a general flow there would be some consistency at least.

When displayed, what I am doing (now) is to first sort by title, and then by marked group (which is why I asked about multiple sorts above). So within each group you would have some consistency, plus the overall pattern to the groups.

In terms of behavior: clearly switching to 'highlighting mode' should set the search restriction and the highlight_only flag. The issue is the one you mentioned -- when does the highlight_only flag get reset to what it was? I am tempted to put a copy of that checkbox back onto the main gui so that the user can easily see it change and can easily reset it. However, real estate is precious, so I would propose a very terse label, something like "H/O" next to the checkbox with a tooltip that tells the user to see the configuration dialog for more information.

I think it needs to be on the GUI front screen where it was originally. The other options on that search preferences are all "set once" type things whereas highlighting is something you are more likely to use on/off particularly if we start (ab)using it for functions like this plugin. The behaviour will be that whenever the last duplicate group is resolved/marked not duplicate the gui will get "reset" in terms of restriction, highlighting mode and cleared search. I could also add a "clear duplicate results" menu item which would do the same thing, for if a user aborts resolving duplicates before the end. I would presume that for highlighting we should remember whatever setting the user had before they did a duplicates search - do we do the same for search restriction too?

Showing duplicate groups is close to useless if the highlighting flag is set unless the search restriction is set to not_duplicate. Is there a way (will there be a way) to see the books in their non-dup pairs? I would like to select a book and have that books non-dups highlighted. Otherwise I have no idea what the pairs are, at least as I can tell.

Totally agree its not there yet particularly if you have highlighting turned on and a duplicates restriction, then it really doesn't work . It is a mutually exclusive behaviour with displaying the current duplicate results, because of course you can/will have books appearing in the exemption list that have not been marked as potential duplicates with your current search. So the search restriction definitely has to change. Then you have to cater for getting back into "show results" mode as well.

Displaying the pairs is the tricky one. We are back to the old chestnut of trying to indicate to the user which is the "root". For instance we could just again use highlighting mode, set a restriction of "marked:not_duplicates", and then give you a menu option of "Show exemptions for this book" which then highlights all the books it is paired with. However as soon as they move their selection they will of course lose who the parent was. Buried two layers of menu down isn't exactly the easiest gui access too. And of course there is also the question of whether you would want this ability while looking at your duplicate groups, rather than only when looking at all your exemptions... I don't have any answers at this point, unless we go back to the idea of a separate dialog again for showing the exemptions?

I think this plugin is very nice. Once it is stable, I would argue that it be merged into calibre itself.

Great to hear dude. As for merging it into Calibre, I guess if once we get to the bottom of the duplicate exemptions and highlighting usability stuff that Kovid is happy with it we could do that. Though I am always tempted like with Plugin Updater to let the faithful who happily download plugins to give it a whirl for a week or two to get some wider feedback first but it is entirely up to you guys.