[GUI Plugin] Kobo Utilities

[PeterT]

The current maintainer has plans to move to the serial number based ID.

[Majutsushi]

Originally Posted by TheOnceAndFuture

Hello I've been trying to use KoboUtilities and I have some questions and feedback about two things that came up that I'd like to share.

Unique device names in profile device dropdown

My partner and I have two of the same device. It's great that KoboUtilities allows you to setup profiles so that each device can sync to a unique set of columns in Calibre. However, when selecting the "Device this profile is used for", it's impossible to know which to select because the devices have the same label.

I tried to do the following, but ultimately I ran into issues:
- In the 'Devices' tab, add your first device.
- Go to both profiles and set that same device as the device for that profile.
- Eject that device and connect the other device.
- Go to the 'Devices' tab and add this new device.
- Go to the profile corresponding to whose device this actually is, and TAB to the 'Device this profile is for' dropdown. DO NOT CLICK IT WITH YOUR MOUSE. Tab over to it and press SPACEBAR — the currently selected device should be the device you initially set it to, thus the other one (the one that is not selected), should be the new device. Use the up/down arrows to select that device, and press ENTER.

This approach in theory should work, but it would be nice if the dropdown simply included a unique identifier for devices (say, the serial number) to make it easier. The reason why I say "in theory should work" is because I wasn't actually able to get my annotations from my second device, which is the next issue.

You can rename devices in the device list, and the new name should show up in the profile assignment dropdown. Would that solve your issue?
At the moment you can only rename the connected device, but I can have a look into renaming non-connected ones as well. I'm also about to release a new version that shows the assigned profile in the device list.

Issue retrieving device metadata with multiple profiles
While I have been able to successfully retrieve metadata from my device, such as 'reading location', which oddly appears to be a filename, 'rest of the book estimate', 'time spent reading', 'last read date', I cannot get it from my other device. I am not sure if this is a separate issue or related to the first issue.

To create a simple environment, both my devices only have a few annotations for 1 book (a different book on each device). I connect one device to calibre, select "Store/restore reading positions", and it pulled the relevant metadata from my 1 book. I safely eject the device and plugin the second device and try the same thing but I am unable to retrieve any data. And oddly, the first time I tried it actually just retrieved the same metadata as the first device, as if the first device was still connected (it wasn't—the second device was). However, I am unable to replicate the behavior and now nothing happens when I try to retrieve metadata from the second device.

In fact, in the process of writing this I'm trying again to pull the metadata, but it doesn't pull from either device now. The behavior is inconsistent and I'm not seeing any errors popup and there doesn't appear to be anything notable in the debug logs (it shows various koboutilities.action entries but nothing indicating an error or retrieval issue per se).

Are other people having issues with this or is it just me?

As far as I know metadata syncing should work fine, so I would need to see the debug logging to get a better idea of what could be the problem. Make sure that settings like "Only if more recent" aren't the cause of the behaviour you're seeing.

Backup annotations file does not appear to work

In my library, I added some annotations to a book. I connected the book to my PC/Calibre, and am able to successfully view those annotations with "Copy annotation for selected book". However, when I try to use "Back up annotation file", no file appears to be created.

Thanks for reading

As I understand it the "Back up annotation files" feature only works for EPUB books, not KEPUB, because the mentioned files are written by the viewer that is only used for EPUB files. For KEPUB books you would have to use the "copy annotations" feature. That could maybe be made a bit clearer.

[nicoboss]

Hello, and thank you first of all to the creators of this plugin and to those who maintain it. That s a great work !
I'm still experimenting with Calibre, but I've managed to organize my e-library nicely.

However, I've run into a problem.
In the Kobo Utilities options, in the Devices tab, my Kobo Clara Color never appears, and the "add connected device" button remains inactive, even though my Kobo is connected and visible in Calibre (I sync my books with no problem). Is there a procedure I've missed? An incompatibility with this tablet I've missed?

These problems have perhaps already been mentioned, and I apologize if I haven't found them (yet).
And please excuse my poor English, I hope I've managed to express myself clearly.

[PeterT]

Standard question. What version of calibre?

Additionally you might like to run calibre in debug mode (Preferences | Restart in debug mode) and post the log file.

[PeterT]

Enhancement idea

Would it be feasible to add a new function to Kobo Utilities to validate a user's settings for Collection transfer to their Kobo.

ie: Validate that the columns defined by the driver DO exist in Calibre, and that Metadata Management is set to Automatic management in the Sending books to device configuration.

[Majutsushi]

If you're talking about the "Collections columns" option in the driver settings, then there was already a recent change to Calibre that checks that configured columns exist. As for checking for automatic metadata management I can't really think of a good place where it would make sense to put that, but I'll think about it.

Edit: I just realized that you've already talked about this in a GitHub issue you opened some time ago. Although the same thing as with the automatic metadata management applies here: I'm not sure how this could be done in the plugin in a way that makes sense. At what point should it do this checking? When deleting a configured column? I'm not sure it's even possible to hook into that, and even if it is I'm not sure the plugin would be the right place for this rather than the driver itself where the columns are actually configured.

[Majutsushi]

I've made a change to how the plugin identifies devices based on a suggestion by @chaley: devices are now identified by their serial number instead of by the Calibre-generated drive UUID. This way devices will still be recognized even after they have been reset.

However there's a bit of fallout from this where I'm not sure what the expected behaviour would be. When renaming a device in the plugin settings it will also update the device name stored in the same 'driveinfo.calibre' file (this is the reason why you can only rename currently connected devices). This means that the updated name will also get lost when resetting a device, and as a result the name in the plugin settings and the name in the file will be out of sync.

As far as I can tell the device name in that file is only used by the 'connected_device_name()' template function, and I'm not sure if users of that function expect it return whatever name they've given a device in the KU plugin dialog.

Keeping these names in sync even after a device reset would essentially require that the plugin checks the file on every connect and updates it if it finds a discrepancy, but that would potentially introduce a race condition if anything else in Calibre wants to update that file as well.

I couldn't find any discussion about why this behaviour of changing the on-device name was introduced in the first place, so maybe no one even knows it exists. Because of this and the above complications I'm tending towards not updating the on-device file and keeping the renaming purely to the KU settings (which would then also allow renaming non-connected devices), but I wanted to first get an understanding of whether people have been using this at all.

[Lavender]

Originally Posted by Majutsushi

I couldn't find any discussion about why this behaviour of changing the on-device name was introduced in the first place, so maybe no one even knows it exists. Because of this and the above complications I'm tending towards not updating the on-device file and keeping the renaming purely to the KU settings (which would then also allow renaming non-connected devices), but I wanted to first get an understanding of whether people have been using this at all.

Are we talking about this device name?

[Majutsushi]

Yes the one in the "Name" column, sorry if that was unclear.

[nicoboss]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Standard question. What version of calibre?

Additionally you might like to run calibre in debug mode (Preferences | Restart in debug mode) and post the log file.

Thank you, I'll try that (as soon as i 'm back and with a computer)

for the version of Calibre, if i remember well, it s 6.29 (stuck at this version because of my old OS - macOS Big Sur 11.7)

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by nicoboss

Thank you, I'll try that (as soon as i 'm back and with a computer)



for the version of Calibre, if i remember well, it s 6.29 (stuck at this version because of my old OS - macOS Big Sur 11.7)

I'm curious... Since calibre 6.29 didn't support the Kobo Clara Colour, what additional plugins did you install to calibre to add support?

I just tried a test where (under Windows) I installed calibre 6.29 Portable. As expected, calibre did not see my Libra Colour. I then installed a "fix" for the Kobo Touchdriver from https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...1&postcount=60 along with Kobo Utilities at which point I had no issue seeing the Kobo from within either calibre or the Kobo Utilities.