[Starson17]

Originally Posted by theducks

Welcome back

Thanks! It's been a long road.

Remember there is a tweak to copy tags

# Control how tags are applied when copying books to another library

That tweak sets whether the new tag (usually applied when a new book is added) is also applied during a CTL process if a new record is created during the CTL process. I'm trying to deal with situations where I've already got a record, but the library I'm adding from has additional metadata that I want incorporated into the destination library. In that situation, I don't create a new record and that tweak doesn't seem to apply.

AFAIK, the destination columns must exist (and have the same target values if: 'with a fixed permitted values').

They do.

I think that if you created the new Library with the 'use existing structure' you will be fine.

I did create them that way or else I added the same fields to both to make the library structures identical.

Everything works great if the destination library has no matching record. The new record created has all the source record metadata.

The problem arises when a record in the source library title/author matches a record in the destination and the source library record has extra metadata, such as tags or a custom #genre column. If the two libraries have the same formats, my only choice is to create an extra record and manually merge. I wrote the first version of that manual merge function and it does what I want it to do - it merges all the data, but it's time consuming for me to manually merge all the records I need merged.

If the two records don't have the same formats, I can use Automerge, but that function only puts the incoming format into the existing record in the destination library. It doesn't bring associated metadata from the source library to the destination record.

Basically, I'd like an option in Automerge for Copy to Library to act like the manual merge works within a single library. If the author/title matches during the CTL operation, apply the manual merge process to merge the metadata of the source with the destination. When I first wrote the automerge function (with Kovid's substantial help) it was designed for normal Adding of books, not CTL, and the treatment of metadata with the incoming books wasn't at the forefront of my mind.)

Since it's been so long since I did any work on Calibre, I thought perhaps someone else (Chaley?) had already built something like this, or perhaps there is a plugin, or perhaps it's already in the buglist as a requested option. Or perhaps someone knows how to do it using some tricks and could make recommendations.

Ideally I'd like to bring in the tags and custom column data (and the comments) from the source library to the destination library record regardless of whether the destination record has all, some or none of the same formats found in the source library record.