Change date format in fetched news/magazine titles?

[truth1ness]

I'm syncing part of my library including news through Send To Device and one issue that comes up on my device is the news items are not in chronological order because of the automatic date format put into magazine/news titles, "[Thu, 21 May 2015]". I'd really like to change this to a chronological friendly format "[2015-05-21]". Is that possible?

Using subdirectories with the date as the folder title would work for magazines but that would mess up my book subfolder scheme which uses another subfolder format.

One proposal is that since the "News" tag already gets special treatment on device transfer (its own New folder, automatic sync, etc), one additional custom behavior could be to auto convert the "pretty" date in the Calibre title to a "chronological" date on the device.

[kovidgoyal]

There is no automatic date, the date format is controlled by the individal news recipes. YOu can use metadata plugboards to modifyy the metadata during send to device.

[truth1ness]

So I noticed that Calibre is actually adding the date format I want at the end of the filename: Economist [Fri, 17 Apr 2015], The_2015-4-17.epub

I'm guessing that's a built in behavior for any items tagged "News"? It didn't do that when it was using the incorrect lower case "news" tag so I'm not sure what is causing that date to be appended. Is there a separate template for News items somewhere? It seems like there is because my non-News books don't have this date field so something else is causing these chronological dates to appear. Is there a way to access this News specific template and re-arrange that chronological date to the beginning?

Here is the template I tried creating in the plugboard (using #date by itself just to see if could even get it to show by itself):

{#tags:'contains($, "News", field('#date'), field('#title'))'}
http://i.imgur.com/5qdE7ie.png

However it didn't seem to change the filenames at all for the News items. I'm not sure if the template is at fault or if, like I said before, News items are following their own template somewhere else?

[kovidgoyal]

Periodicals are treated specially when sending to device, this is to ensure that the files names are unique and do not overwrite previous issues, which can happen very easily otherwise. You cannot control this. Like I said use a metadata plugboard to change the title to whatever format you like.

[truth1ness]

Thanks. Is my plugboard on the right track? My understanding is that code/template should be performing:

"If the field #tags (specified by $) contains "News" then use the field #date as #title, and if not use #title as #title"

But it doesn't seem to affect the News items or anything at all.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by truth1ness

Thanks. Is my plugboard on the right track? My understanding is that code/template should be performing:

But it doesn't seem to affect the News items or anything at all.

Plugboards change the metadata stored in a book. They have no effect on the metadata used when evaluating send* templates to determine the path used to store the book.

[truth1ness]

Ah ok. So then plugboards don't accomplish what I'm trying to do which is edit the actual file names, it sounds like it needs to be changed in the News items' unique sync rules.

I'd really like to see an option or have the default to have the News sync rules put the appended chronological date at the beginning of the file name instead of the end:

Current:
Economist [Fri, 17 Apr 2015], The_2015-4-17.epub

More useful:
2015-04-17 Economist [Fri, 17 Apr 2015], The_.epub

The usefulness of a chronological date scheme is lost when it is not at the front of a file name. Putting it at the end is just redundant because Calibre already adds a date to all Fetched News items at the time of creation. Putting this chronological date at the beginning will allow chronological sorting (which is how most people consume magazines/news) when accessing the files on devices such as Dropbox.