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Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
What is clicking on the links in the secondary windows going to do?
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I was intending to turn them off.
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And while this is a relatively low effort hack to make storing ancilliary information possible, I would much rather store it correctly in a table in the same library. Doing it this way has all the problems of maintaining data in multiple places. You rename/delete a publisher, you have to do it in two places, you have to update the links manually, etc. Not to mention this is completely undiscoverable for an average user.
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Although it is really up to @BetterRed to argue for this scheme that he has spent years perfecting, I see some advantages to using another library for column value metadata.
- The user can use full calibre to structure the information about the item. For example, with publishers one can have all the things he mentioned in post #9. The information is searchable and sortable. It is easily edited.
- You can use the same "other library" for multiple "book" libraries, e.g., a single publishers library for Comics, Journal Articles, and book genres. This gives you one place to maintain the publisher data.
- The "book details" popup is familiar to users. For convenience, a link to show the "book" in the other library can be on that screen.
Adding a "link" to all columns could be better than the search scheme proposed above, but possibly not. Search links can be entered without looking at the other library or knowing the book id. They tolerate the book id being changed. A hybrid method is to add a column that contains the other library name and the column to search instead of a book link.
Related: I have been bothered for a long time that entering a link in the authors table silently overrides all the other link options. My personal preference would be to use two links as in:
Authors: Joe Blogs (details), John Smith (details)
The link for the author would do what is specified in Look & feel. The "details" link would use the link in the authors table. This same idea would extend to the other columns.
The current "implementation" using a column gives us a way to test these theories without changing the database scheme and introducing a mess of UI changes.
I will look a bit more at what I have done, but won't submit it until we reach some resolution.