[GUI Plugin] Temp Marker

[kiwidude]

Why do you want to do a "batch delete"?

The way Find Duplicates is "intended" is that you reolve each batch of duplicate books at the point you are working with each group. You either merge them, or you delete the ones you don't want, or you decide that batch is too complicated to deal with right now and move onto the next one until only your "too hard" ones are left.

I can't see any benefit to temporarily marking books for deletion and then doing so at some later point, over doing so immediately? Temp marking will only last until you close calibre down, and at least by resolving a duplicate group at that point it means the impact is immediate.

[Mixx]

Well, if I delete the undesired books as I go, each of them takes a considerable amount of time (with a couple of thousand books in the database) to delete and return control to the GUI. This is why I thought I'd just mark them first and delete all unwanted ones at one strike (before I leave the Calibre session). I still think I can make a case for this "workflow". It would be much quicker that way.

Thanxx, Mixx

[Mixx]

(Sorry, never mind this message).

[kiwidude]

I spotted your message earlier before you corrected it, glad I double checked before investigating

Sounds to me like you are trying to work around some sort of performance issue you are having with calibre. I'm afraid I am not going to try to change the plugin behaviour (I would have to change multiple plugins, re-test them all, and for no real benefit).

I suggest instead you post a bug request or in the library mgmt forum to ask if someone can take a look at whether it is possible to improve the delete performance or advise you how best to work around it. Post the details of how big your library is etc - it is a known issue with calibre that once your library starts getting past 10,000 books performance goes noticeably downhill in a few areas.

[Mixx]

Kiwidude,

thanks a million for your support. Indeed, it is a performance issue I am trying to fix. And it does not work, btw., as the exporting to a temp. library and importing back the clean books takes time, too. I guess I just need to accept that I have a given percentage of duplicates in my library.

Still, the plug-in is very useful and I am a frequent user of it, thanks for having made it.

Thanxx, Mixx

[kiwidude]

Yes, getting a "clean" library when you have books numbering in the thousands is indeed a time consuming exercise. Though I would have thought that the time spent on a delete operation vs the time you will have spent opening and comparing all the books to decide which version you want to keep would still not be that significant. You could do what I do of clicking the hyperlink of the next book format in the book details panel, and while waiting for the ebookviewer to display, kick off a delete, task switch to your ebook viewer, make a decision, close and repeat etc. Saves a few brain cycles.

Or you can do what some of us do of having a separate library for the "cleaned" books. Create a new library, then from the existing one use the "Copy to Library" feature to move books into your "clean" library, perhaps by all books for an author at a time. That way Find Duplicates is only dealing with a smaller number of problem groups, your "clean" library will be far smaller (reducing the delete time) etc.

Or else it could just be hardware related - defrag your disk, get a faster drive or even a memory based disk and put your library on that.

[odinokij]

Thank you very much for this plugin, it saves me lot of time to make selections. It's great, but.... it would be nicer if you could configure the plugin to color the selected books, or you could configure the "color column" option of calibre for the "marked:true" books ("marked" doesn't appear at the column list).

Thanks again,
Odinokij

[davidfor]

kiwidude,

I just had a play with this and noticed something. If the device list is displayed and the button pressed, it is still acting on the library list. The device list doesn't support the temp marker (unfortunately). A "not on the device list" message should be displayed.

And yes, I wasn't interested in using the plugin, only in "borrowing" code. Hmm, maybe I should have addressed you with your title

David

[kiwidude]

@davidfor - yeah it is a problem a few plugins have that JimmXinu found a while ago. I've slowly been updating plugins with some relevant code to handle it whenever they come up for a need to update. Given that no-one else had noticed in two years of usage across hundreds of thousands of downloads it hasn't been much of a priority to sort out...

[barny]

Thanks for this addin, it is very useful and so nearly what I need...

How difficult would it be to extend it to add two additional operations:

• mark all books by same author

• mark all books in same series

My scenario is that I'm trying to tidy up my library and doing individual deletes takes too long, and navigating off to all books by same author (by pressing alt-A) to delete them all is too distracting because I lose the view I'm working in - so if I can mark all the books by an author from one of them in any view, then once I've done all the marking, view the marked list and delete them in one hit, that would be much easier for me.

If you aren't interested/don't have time I might have a hack at it myself.

Thanks
barny

[theducks]

Originally Posted by barny

Thanks for this addin, it is very useful and so nearly what I need...

How difficult would it be to extend it to add two additional operations:

• mark all books by same author

• mark all books in same series

My scenario is that I'm trying to tidy up my library and doing individual deletes takes too long, and navigating off to all books by same author (by pressing alt-A) to delete them all is too distracting because I lose the view I'm working in - so if I can mark all the books by an author from one of them in any view, then once I've done all the marking, view the marked list and delete them in one hit, that would be much easier for me.

If you aren't interested/don't have time I might have a hack at it myself.

Thanks
barny

Use the Tag Browser to find books by Author, Series,...whatever.
Then use Ctrl-A (select All)

[barny]

Sorry don't understand how this helps - maybe my library tagging is inadequate but having to improve my tags on every book would make even more work.

Here's a more concrete example: say I search for all books where the comments include the word 'cowboy' so I get a view with thirty books, and for twenty of these I want to mark all books by each of their authors. I don't want to have to manually process these where I: select a book in the search result, press alt-a to view all the books by that author, press ctrl-a to select all that author's books, click twice to temp mark them, then go back and reselect my search, figure out which is the next book to do, and repeat, for each of the search results. That's two keypresses and a click then another click to reselect the search, all times the number of search results. For my example with twenty search results that's 40 keypresses and 60 mouse clicks, and a very tedious piece of work.

Instead I'd like to do the search, click to select what appears to be relevant search results, go to the temp mark addin, select 'mark all books by the authors of the selected book(s)' or 'mark all books in the same series as the selected book(s)' - after selecting the books in the search results that's a keypress and two clicks after doing the search regardless of the number of results.

And if I'm using the temp mark plugin like this, I could also do some marking of books with (pony|foal) in the comments, or ones that are tagged 'western', then at the end go to the list of marked items and review them in more detail before doing whatever I want to do with them: delete, mark as to read, export to a different library,...

Or is there another existing way of doing this that involves the same-ish constant number of keystrokes/clicks as what I just described regardless of the number of search results, i.e. not having to do an additional manual operation to process each item I'm interested in the search result?

[BetterRed]

@barny - if you are using Windows you could use AutoHotKey or AutoIt to script the Calibre repetitive tasks, there are others whose names I cant recall, and OS/X and Linux have similar gadgets available.

My preference is AHK, its a cousin of Autoit

BR

[barny]

Here's the result of a quick hack, seems to do what I want. I changed the name to Temp Marker Enhanced, with version number back to 0,0,1 just so there aren't any unfortunate incidents with anyone thinking this is the latest official version of Temp Marker.

Changes from Temp Marker 1.2.1:

• Renamed to Temp Marker Enhanced - still copyright to kiwidude cos he did all the hard work
• Added 'Mark/Unmark all books by selected author'
• Added 'Mark/Unmark all books in same series'
• Handles multiple authors of a selected book, and empty series
• Can a book be in multiple series? If so, note I haven't tested this.
• Version now 0.0.1

Afficionados of plugin development may blanche when they see I've simply hardcoded the indexes into iterall() results to get the authors and series, but it works well enough for what I need at the moment anyway, and I don't know where to go to get documentation to tell me how to do it properly.

Use at your own peril, no warranty, etc.


Thanks to KiwiDude because without his efforts this wouldn't have only taken a few hours!

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Add ability to mark/unmark all books by selected author(s) or series (contribution by barny)
• When switching libraries, ensure keyboard shortcuts are reactivated
• Prevent plugin being used in Device View or on Device View context menu

Credit for the new feature idea to barny above. Note that I have changed the implementation from your own (for instance I found that your selected authors feature didn't work in your implementation, the code was incomplete). You may want to remove your attachment now to prevent any confusion to others in future.