[chaley]

Originally Posted by kaufman

I've been trying to get the Read stuff to work, and I can't seem to get it to display.

If you take a look at the four attached screenshots, one of them shows my settings so you can see if I have put the column names in correctly. Two of them show the book details page. One is the top of the page showing that the read checkbox isn't checked, and the other is showing the bottom of the page showing the readrecently value is checked. The last is the screenshot from calibre with the column definition.

A couple of things:

1) Am I using this function correctly? I've been assuming the the checkbox is a two way field. It sets the value if you change it and it shows the current value. Is this correct?

I need to write the FAQ page.

I am not sure what you have done, so I will instead say what I expect to happen. First, the syncing between the calibre custom column and CC's column happens when you connect as a wireless device. There are three cases:

1) You define the syncing column in settings. The next time you connect as a wireless device, calibre and CC do a special sync. If CC's read value is not empty, then it is synced to calibre's field, otherwise if calibre's field is not empty it syncs to CC's field.

2) For subsequent syncs: if you have changed CC's field (in book details the value in the box differs from the value shown in calibre's column), then the value in the box is written to calibre's database. Otherwise the information in calibre's field is written to CC's value (the one in the box).

3) If neither CC nor calibre's value have changed, nothing happens.

These rules mean that CC's value "wins" over calibre's value.

So, for your example, are you running calibre from source? If you are not, then the version you are running does not yet support syncing. If you are running from source, did you sync after you defined the column name in CC's settings? If so, I would expect that calibre's value would appear in CC's read box.

2) Rather then forcing the user to type in the field name, wouldn't it make more sense to allow them to choose from the existing names. This might also make sense for the custom grouping columns.

Of course you are right. Unfortunately, CC doesn't have a list of custom columns, and in general cannot have that list. Each book can have a different list, as each book can come from a different library. In fact, there might not be any books in the library when the setup is done. Because of this, we cannot know what the column keys are before we connect to a specific library, and we cannot know that the keys are still the same the next time we connect.

Because of these complexities I decided to have the user provide the key. I know that this is less than ideal, but it avoids other problems that would be inexplicable.

3) I think "Read" might be a better label then "Marked Read". None of the other labels have verbs associated with them. It just seems out of place to me.

I have gone back and forth on this for weeks. My problem always comes down to the meaning of "No". If the label is "Read", then "No" carries the strong semantics of "Not Read". However, books with the empty mark are also almost certainly "Not Read" as well. In this case, what is the meaning of the two? By using the label "Marked Read", the meaning of "No" changes to "It hasn't been marked", which makes it easier to apply one's own semantics to it.

This is the kind of thing that I am not good at. I welcome any discussion.

As always, thanks for the help.

Thank you for taking the time to comment! CC wouldn't be the product it is without feedback from interested (and patient) users.