Suggestion: Scheduled connection

[PeterT]

I was musing this morning about calibre news feeds and how they interface with devices.

Would there be any benefit in having CC able to "schedule" a wireless device connection to calibre, and then, calibre could perform it's automatic transfer of a scheduled recipe run to CC?

[chaley]

This is really a question for the rest of the CC community. I wouldn't use the feature, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful.

One question: how is this significantly better than connecting by hand? Are you trying to avoid waiting for all the handshaking to complete? Also, clearly this feature would require that calibre be running at scheduled connection time.

I am not sure how a feature like this would interact with devices going to sleep, or behave if Android decides to kill CC's process because it has been in the background too long or if CC is already connected. There may be dragons there.

[PeterT]

My thinking was that of totally automating the news delivery process from calibre to CC so that one could leave home in the morning with the day's news loaded with no manual intervention; great for people with a hectic morning schedule.

[snarkophilus]

This is a feature I'd use, with Peter's exact use case.

Cheers,
Simon.

[chaley]

The next beta (sometime in the next few days) will have the option of a scheduled connection once per day at a fixed time. It seems to work, tolerating the device being off (not cold-boot off but off-button off), already connected as a wireless device, and already connected to the content server.

Because it must operate when the phone is sleeping it cannot talk to the user. Because of this, if a connection goes wrong the only way to know what happened is to look at CC's debug log.

I confess to being a bit nervous about this feature. CC wasn't designed to do WD connections in the background. We will see if I have handled the multi-thread access cases correctly.

[chaley]

This feature is in beta but so far none of the testers seem interested in it. Would either of you consider joining the program to test it before general release?

[PeterT]

Will do...

[hleo12]

Any updates on how this works?

I must admit, I don't really have a specific need for this feature since all I have on my library are books (also comics and manga) and nothing else. So I just add the books on Calibre and sync it to my device immediately after.

But I am all for implementing new features.

[PeterT]

It's working great. Now when I head out the door in the morning, I always have the daily scraping of The Toronto Star to peruse on my tablet.

[kintrupf]

I use the cloud connection (Dropbox), so I can't use any schedules for a wireless device connection

What I would like is a shortcut or something like that so that I can trigger a cloud sync whenever I've automatically established a WiFi connection at night with my automation tool. "Cloud sync" meaning that CC would pull all books not on the device from the cloud and (maybe) delete all books that are no longer available in the cloud. Though it would probably better if an automatic sync would not delete anything or only as an advance feature with a proper warning at setup

That way I can better control the sync. So only try to sync if WiFi is connected and battery has enough juice or charger is connected or something like that without adding that ballast to CC...

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kintrupf

I use the cloud connection (Dropbox), so I can't use any schedules for a wireless device connection

What I would like is a shortcut or something like that so that I can trigger a cloud sync whenever I've automatically established a WiFi connection at night with my automation tool. "Cloud sync" meaning that CC would pull all books not on the device from the cloud and (maybe) delete all books that are no longer available in the cloud. Though it would probably better if an automatic sync would not delete anything or only as an advance feature with a proper warning at setup

That way I can better control the sync. So only try to sync if WiFi is connected and battery has enough juice or charger is connected or something like that without adding that ballast to CC...

One problem is that a "cloud sync" function does not exist in CC. Doing such a thing would require invoking a series of internal CC functions, checking errors, checking for finished, etc. I am very nervous about starting down the path to providing this kind of automation. The number of things people can (and will) ask for is very large. I would end up needing to provide some kind of scripting language through (probably) some kind of content provider interface. This would be a lot of work, and there are a lot of ways to break things.

If you have a calibre library in Dropbox then you must have a computer that runs calibre. Why not have calibre auto-start at a particular time then use CC's existing auto-connect? You could also use the reading list plugin to automatically send new books during this auto-connection.

You mention choosing whether or not to auto-connect based on some criteria. Currently CC's auto-connect service is private, but I have no problem making it public. That should allow your tool to ask CC to auto-connect whenever it wants by invoking the service com.multipie.cclibrary.ConnectionAlarmService.