Manage Tags and Virtual Libraries

[BookJunkieLI]

I'm at work so I'm using 1.48, at home I have 2.20 on a Win7 machine but, AFAIK, the behaviour is the same.

When working with a Virtual Library the tags shown in the Tag Pane are limited to the ones attached to the books shown by the Virtual Library. However if you click on Manage Tags it gives you all of the tags listed in the entire library.

Is there anyway to bulk edit tags, similar to the Tag Manager, but limited to just the Virtual Library books? Without having to shift those books out to their own physical library?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by BookJunkieLI

I'm at work so I'm using 1.48, at home I have 2.20 on a Win7 machine but, AFAIK, the behaviour is the same.

When working with a Virtual Library the tags shown in the Tag Pane are limited to the ones attached to the books shown by the Virtual Library. However if you click on Manage Tags it gives you all of the tags listed in the entire library.

@BookJunkieLI - I see the same result with both calibre 2.20 and 1.48. When a VL is active, the tags shown in the Categories sidebar and in Manage Tags is the subset as defined by the Tags column of the books in the current VL. Same with other categories, like author and publisher.

As far as I know its been like that since VL's were 'invented'.

Maybe you've stumbled on another long standing quirk of VLs. Do you have any View Manager search effects in play.

I often wish for Show All/Show Subset keyboard toggles in the Categories sidebar and Manage <whatevers> windows.

Originally Posted by BookJunkieLI

Is there anyway to bulk edit tags, similar to the Tag Manager, but limited to just the Virtual Library books? Without having to shift those books out to their own physical library?

¿ What bulk operations can you do in Manage Tags that you can't do with right click operations in the Categories sidebar (tag browser) ? Apart from sorting by count... actually I think you even can do that, somewhere there's something to do with arranging Tags by 'popularity' - might be a Tweak.

BR

[BookJunkieLI]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@BookJunkieLI - I see the same result with both calibre 2.20 and 1.48. When a VL is active, the tags shown in the Categories sidebar and in Manage Tags is the subset as defined by the Tags column of the books in the current VL. Same with other categories, like author and publisher.

As far as I know its been like that since VL's were 'invented'.

headdesk - repeat ad nauseum.

sigh. It's coming up the way it should now and I have no idea what I might have done differently.

Maybe you've stumbled on another long standing quirk of VLs. Do you have any View Manager search effects in play.

I'm usually working with View Manager with an initial Virtual Library of #done:false and series:false. Because I'm working with fanfiction I usually then select the fandom I want to work on from a custom column called #fandom and add it to the Virtual Library setting with the *current search option. Up until now if I went to Manage Tags the very first tag that appeared was always (Merlin)/Freya even when I had a fandom that wasn't Merlin selected for the VL.

If I can get it to do it again where it doesn't narrow down the tags in Manage Tags I'll post the steps to hopefully recreate it.

¿ What bulk operations can you do in Manage Tags that you can't do with right click operations in the Categories sidebar (tag browser) ? Apart from sorting by count.. actually I think you even can do that, somewhere there's something to do with arranging Tags by 'popularity' - might be a Tweak.

Unless I'm missing something right-clicking in the Categories sidebar and then selecting Manage Tags is the same as going to Alter Tags=>Manages Authors, Tags, Etc=>Manage Tags.

All that I'm looking to be able to do is manage aka delete tags within a specific virtual library. Which it apparently does now even though I could have sworn it absolutely wasn't just before I made my original post. Meh.

Thanks for taking a look even if I am apparently going crazy.

[BetterRed]

"It" probably read my post and decided to play hide-and-seek

Virtual Libraries and the Category sidebar have long confused me. I want to assume** that deleting a Tag from the Category sidebar within the context of a VL will remove it from the books in the current VL, and only delete the Tag itself if the resultant physical library usage count is zero, but it doesn't do that. But nor does it seem to do that in Manage Tags. The Tag is removed/changed from/in the physical library.

**I 'sort of' knew right click Rename/Delete on a category don't work as I thought they worked - i.e. limit the scope of the operation to the current VL, rather than apply it across the physical library. To me, it seems inconsistent to have left click operations operate within the subset of books defined by the current VL, whilst right click operations operate across all books in current physical library. C'est la vie... just another san fairy Anne moment

To remove the tag _silly from books in VL-A but leave it in books not in VL-A, I have to select VL-A, then select _silly in the Tags section of the Category sidebar, then select all the books displayed for search tags:"=_silly", and then do a bulk metadata edit to remove the _silly tag from those books only.

BR

[BookJunkieLI]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

"It" probably read my post and decided to play hide-and-seek

Of course it did. Now that I'm determined to clean up all the metadata in my ginormous library Calibre is determined to drive me crazy.

Virtual Libraries and the Category sidebar have long confused me. I want to assume** that deleting a Tag from the Category sidebar within the context of a VL will remove it from the books in the current VL, and only delete the Tag itself if the resultant physical library usage count is zero, but it doesn't do that. But nor does it seem to do that in Manage Tags. The Tag is removed/changed from/in the physical library.

Wait. If I'm working in VL-A and Manage Tags tells me tag=action only has 7 instances and I say go ahead and delete but tag=action actually had 33 instances in the entire library it deletes all 33 instances? That's...that's... arghhhhh Completely and not what I would expect it to do and could totally screw things up. Why, Calibre? Why do you do that?

**I 'sort of' knew right click Rename/Delete on a category don't work as I thought they worked - i.e. limit the scope of the operation to the current VL, rather than apply it across the physical library. To me, it seems inconsistent to have left click operations operate within the subset of books defined by the current VL, whilst right click operations operate across all books in current physical library.

Yeah, I have to agree. At least give some kind of warning that, hey, you're not affecting just what you see but all of the books in your library.

To remove the tag _silly from books in VL-A but leave it in books not in VL-A, I have to select VL-A, then select _silly in the Tags section of the Category sidebar, then select all the books displayed for search tags:"=_silly", and then do a bulk metadata edit to remove the _silly tag from those books only.

What would be really nice is if there was a way in bulk metadata edit to see the tags associated with all of (and only) the books selected and edit them that way. But again, only affecting the books selected.

Sigh. I guess I'm back to Plan B of temporarily shifting each individual fandom to a separate library for editing then back.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by BookJunkieLI

Yeah, I have to agree. At least give some kind of warning that, hey, you're not affecting just what you see but all of the books in your library.

It does give a warning:-



Maybe it ought to be 'from all books (nnn) in the physical library'

BR

[chaley]

As the person who wrote the original code to do renames etc, I can safely say that changing calibre to take VLs into account is quite hard. It isn't something I am interested in doing. If someone really wants that behavior then they are welcome to implement it.

However, if the assembled multitudes (including Kovid) agree then I can remove the options (grey them out) in the tag browser to do renames etc if there is a VL in force. This would prevent someone doing things that they think apply to the VL at the cost of having to turn off the VL if s/he really wants to do it.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by chaley

As the person who wrote the original code to do renames etc, I can safely say that changing calibre to take VLs into account is quite hard. It isn't something I am interested in doing. If someone really wants that behavior then they are welcome to implement it.

However, if the assembled multitudes (including Kovid) agree then I can remove the options (grey them out) i the tag browser to do renames etc if there is a VL in force. This would prevent someone doing things that they think apply to the VL at the cost of having to turn off the VL if s/he really wants to do it.

I vote for 'disable' while VL's are focused. Too many just click OK on warnings

[BetterRed]

@chaley - thanks for chiming in, I'd be in favour of disabling Rename and Delete when a VL is in play.

An alternative would be to make the confirm message very explicit as I suggested, and maybe remove the checkbox to hide the message (or make it a 'for this session only' hide).

When a VL is active one of the things one can't do is to drag a book to a Tag that's not already assigned to another book in the same VL. So would it be possible to provide a toggle to decouple/couple the the Categories sidebar (Tag browser) from Virtual Libraries. I'm thinking it would be in the white space context menu with Show all categories and Change sub-cat scheme.

Also, would it be possible to have a preference that would decouple the Manage... function from Virtual Libraries.

I think I know the answers, but... Newton, apples and all that

BR

[BookJunkieLI]

I agree with either disabling the option or making the confirm message more explicit. The way it reads right now there is no reason not to think it means just the books in the VL since all the other behaviour seems to apply to just the VL.

[chaley]

After some helpful advice from Kovid, I am going to try to make rename & delete items in the tag browser be aware of VLs. We will see ...

[BookJunkieLI]

Thanks for looking into it, chaley. I really do appreciate all the work you've done on Calibre.

[chaley]

OK, now to the nitty gritty.

What happens if you are in a VL and rename an item, simply changing its case? As calibre cannot support having two items the same except for case, there are two choices. First: don't change the case so that the items outside the VL are not changed. Second: change the case everywhere, including outside the VL.

I am indifferent.

Kovid leans toward changing case everywhere, saying that it would be weird if someone does a rename to change case and nothing happens.

The current prototype changes case everywhere.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by chaley

OK, now to the nitty gritty.

What happens if you are in a VL and rename an item, simply changing its case? As calibre cannot support having two items the same except for case, there are two choices. First: don't change the case so that the items outside the VL are not changed. Second: change the case everywhere, including outside the VL.

I am indifferent.

Kovid leans toward changing case everywhere, saying that it would be weird if someone does a rename to change case and nothing happens.

The current prototype changes case everywhere.

I am leaning towards just disable these (menu choices)in a VL
Deleting Tags can be done via Bulk metadata edit (Select all in the VL, then remove tags)

OTOH
rename tags (case change) of tags already gets jerked around if you IMPORT metadata with a different case. So Change All still seems good

[BookJunkieLI]

Originally Posted by theducks

OTOH
rename tags (case change) of tags already gets jerked around if you IMPORT metadata with a different case. So Change All still seems good

I also lean towards Change All because having the same tag with lower and upper case seems redundant to me. Of course, someone could probably argue for why such an instance might be necessary...

Originally Posted by theducks

I am leaning towards just disable these (menu choices)in a VL
Deleting Tags can be done via Bulk metadata edit (Select all in the VL, then remove tags)

My issue with deleting tags via Bulk metadata edit is that unless you know exactly which tag you want to delete or are simply deleting all of them you don't know what tags are associated with the books selected. In single metadata edit you can bring up the little table that allows you to apply/unapply tags but you can see exactly what's associated with that book. I would love love a table like that in Bulk Edit. Or for Manage Tags to only edit books associated with the active Virtual Library. Whichever is easier. Or if neither is easy/doable then I will accept that.