Kobo Directory Templates

[Irian]

Heya,

I've been using this template for a while and generally it works fine...

program:

series = test( field('series'), field('series'), '');
topic = test( field('#topic'), field('#topic'), '');

category = first_non_empty(series, topic);

strippedcategory = re(category, '^(A|The|An|Der|Die|Das)\s+', '');
initialofcategory = substr( strippedcategory, 0, 1 );

idx = field('series_index');
indexno = contains(idx, '\.', format_number(idx, '04.1f'), format_number(idx, '02d'));
index = test(series, strcat( indexno , ' - '), '');

cleanedCategory = re(category, ' & ', ' and ');
cleanedCategory = re(category, '&', ' and ');

foldernameforcategory = strcat(initialofcategory, '/', cleanedCategory, '/', index);

defaultfoldername = 'other/';

cleanedTitle = field('title');

finalfolder = test(category, foldernameforcategory, defaultfoldername);

strcat('books/', finalfolder, cleanedTitle );

Basically, for my kobo, my books are sorted under their series (if any) or their topic (a custom field), grouped by the first letter of either (A/A-Series, The; B/B-Topic, etc.). So far, so good...

Now I wanted to be clever and though, if I used the "topic" column to add a sub-topic as well, it could sort it under the sub-directory, for example:

"Programming" -> goes under P/Programming
"Programming/C" -> goes under P/Programming/C
"Programming/Java" -> goes under P/Programming/Java

In calibre when this is displayed, it also looks correct, but unfortunately, when loading them onto the Kobo, it actually works out to...

"Programming" -> goes under P/Programming
"Programming/C" -> goes under P/Programming_C
"Programming/Java" -> goes under P/Programming_Java

So, any idea what's causing this and is there an easy way to clean up the topic string to get the correct result?

[theducks]

slash is a special character to file systems, so the Value in the fields gets changed to _ when used in a file template. <this is for normal, cross OS compatibility process in Calibre>

[ownedbycats]

See this thread:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...ht=underscores

[Irian]

Thanks, worked perfectly.

[Irian]

Ok, one problem I found with that: Calibre does not recognize the books on the reader that way, so they appear there in the right folder, but Calibre does not show them as "On Device" when syncing... Hm...

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Irian

Ok, one problem I found with that: Calibre does not recognize the books on the reader that way, so they appear there in the right folder, but Calibre does not show them as "On Device" when syncing... Hm...

Calibre should be matching the books on a Kobo device using the title and authors. There is a problem if there are multiple authors. Kobo only reads the first from the metadata and that breaks the matching. To counter this, I recommend using a metadata plugboard and setting the author using the template:

program: raw_list('authors', ', ')

That improves the matching for multiple authors to nearly perfect. And it is also the way the device understands authors, so it works better there.

[Irian]

To be honest, I really doubt that this is the reason. Before I added the re-placement, all books were correctly identified as being on my Kobo, only after doing so, suddenly they were synced to the correct directory (good) - but not recognized as "on the device" anymore (bad). So the only change I made is adding the "re..." thing. Also the fact that this happens only for the books that have that "/" in the custom field, but none of the others, points really in the direction of that being the problem, doesn't it?