[iOS] CC Imports books with multiple "genres" into new bins - help?

[jensenholmes]

Hi. I've spent the last week organizing my ebook collection using calibre (on my PC/Windows 10) and calibre companion (on my new ipad air 2). I can't believe how great it is! Previously, I used calibre to create ebooks for sale, but I never thought to use it to organize my collection. It's so much better than ibooks or kindle or anything else I tried. I'm in OCD heaven! Everything has worked great for me -- the sync between the two devices is super easy. I was able to find a tutorial online to add my custom "genre" column to CC.

But I'm now trying to fine tune various components, and I have one issue that I can't resolve. I have nearly 2000 ebooks in my collection. I created a hierarchical "genre" custom field in calibre. I sorted all my books into various genres. For example, "Thriller/mystery" or "mf romance.fantasy". It works great.

Here's the issue: Many books I put in multiple categories. For example, one book might have this genre field: "mf romance.contemporary, mf romance.christmas, mf romance.occupation.cop, mf romance.heat.2". That works great in Calibre, because the one book will just show up in all those various 'bins' in the hierarchical genre structure. The problem comes when I send it to CC.

Instead of having that one book appear in multiple bins, what I get in CC is a brand new bin under "Genre" that is this: "mf romance.contemporary, mf romance.christmas, mf romance.occupation.cop, mf romance.heat.2" (all those together). That bin has 1 book in it. And worse, that book then does not appear in the simpler "mf.romance.contemporary" genre bin when I tap on that.

As a result, my CC "Genre" tab is a mess with way too many entries. And it's difficult to find anything because my "contemporaries" are now in like 50 separate bins.

It seems like there is no way to "combine" the items under Genre. So my thought was to go back in Calibre and reorganize everything, this time only having ONE main genre and putting the other identifiers in tags instead. (I chose not to use Tags initially because tags are downloaded with metadata so there are a lot of preset ones that I'm not interested in. But I can work around that.)

This isn't an ideal solution, because some books really are 2 genres -- like Contemporary and Christmas. But barring a fix from CC, it seems like my best option. However, an addition problem is that, once I change a book in Calibre to point to only ONE genre, putting other things in Tags, and then reupload it to CC, the old multiple-genre bin in CC does not vanish! That 'bin' is still showing in the list, only now it's empty. That behavior is inconsistent with Calibre where, once you remove the last item in a Genre identifier, that identifier vanishes too. So, that doesn't help me clean up my list at all. It's super annoying tapping through all the bins trying to figure out where the books actually are.

Anyone have a suggestion for me? Is there a way to a) tell CC to only take the first "genre" in the genre field, and/or b) delete genre list items that are empty?

Thanks in advance!
Jane

[ekbell]

Having checked my hierarchical genre column in both the android and iOS CCs ,I think that what we have here is a some bugs in the iOS CC as my genre grouping was properly set up on the android CC and showed the same problems on the iOS CC

[jensenholmes]

Originally Posted by ekbell

Having checked my hierarchical genre column in both the android and iOS CCs ,I think that what we have here is a some bugs in the iOS CC as my genre grouping was properly set up on the android CC and showed the same problems on the iOS CC

I guess that makes sense. It's a bug. Thank you for checking the Android vs IOS. How often does CC update/bug fix? I'm wondering if I should delete my entire CC library, fix my Genres/tags in Calibre, and reupload to CC. There doesn't seem to be any way in CC to delete Genre list entries once they are there (I don't think). It's pretty unmanageable the way it is now.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by jensenholmes

I guess that makes sense. It's a bug. Thank you for checking the Android vs IOS. How often does CC update/bug fix? I'm wondering if I should delete my entire CC library, fix my Genres/tags in Calibre, and reupload to CC. There doesn't seem to be any way in CC to delete Genre list entries once they are there (I don't think). It's pretty unmanageable the way it is now.

It's not a bug it is a feature in the android app that has not been implemented in the IOS app. It was at least a year before it was implemented in Android. Until this feature is implemented (if it ever is) the solution is to not show your custom genre column and just use tags.

There is no reason that a book can't have 2 or more tags. I use the Goodreads metadata plugin to help manage the tags I download. I only download tags from Goodreads. The mapping utility of this plugin allows you to map the tags that are downloaded from Goodreads to improve their uniformity.

[Terisa de morgan]

Any custom tag, not only genres, has the problem (I've seen it in another columns, which are not hierarchical).

[jensenholmes]

I'm still working on fixing up my Genres and Tags.

Is there any way to get CC to remove an empty Genre list item (one that has 0 books)? I found a mention online of setting Calibre options for "Sending to Devices" to "Automatic Management" and this would supposedly enable Calibre to delete "Collections" when they were empty. But this did not remove either Genre or Tags that were empty.

Ideally, if I could get CC to do this, I could just slowly fix up my tags and Genres over time. But if I can't get it to delete empty list items, I suppose I have to delete the entire library on my ipad air 2, fix all my tags/genres in Calibre, and then reupload the entire thing. So how do I delete the library on my ipad? Delete the CC app and reinstall?

[chaley]

Originally Posted by jensenholmes

Is there any way to get CC to remove an empty Genre list item (one that has 0 books)? I found a mention online of setting Calibre options for "Sending to Devices" to "Automatic Management" and this would supposedly enable Calibre to delete "Collections" when they were empty. But this did not remove either Genre or Tags that were empty.

I don't have an iOS device, but I do have some familiarity with Android CC.

Android CC has a setting controlling what items appear in the grouping drawer. In Android CC, empty items appear in the grouping drawer if they are selected in that setting. Does such a setting exist in iOS CC? Did you need to do something back-when to tell CC to add Genre, and can you undo that?

[jensenholmes]

Originally Posted by chaley

I don't have an iOS device, but I do have some familiarity with Android CC.

Android CC has a setting controlling what items appear in the grouping drawer. In Android CC, empty items appear in the grouping drawer if they are selected in that setting. Does such a setting exist in iOS CC? Did you need to do something back-when to tell CC to add Genre, and can you undo that?

Under Settings in CC there is a "Customize the grouping drawer", but in that you can only turn on or off the entire "Genre" field (if you turn it 'off' none of the Genre listings appear in the grouping drawer). I don't see any way to manage individual genre list items or select to remove empty ones). What is the setting on the Android?

[chaley]

Originally Posted by jensenholmes

Under Settings in CC there is a "Customize the grouping drawer", but in that you can only turn on or off the entire "Genre" field (if you turn it 'off' none of the Genre listings appear in the grouping drawer). I don't see any way to manage individual genre list items or select to remove empty ones). What is the setting on the Android?

I am confused. I thought you wanted to remove the Genre group because it contains no entries. Are you saying instead that iOS CC is showing Genre items that have no books? Android CC doesn't do that. I would argue that showing empty item lines is a bug, just as not cutting the genre items apart at the comma is a bug.

My son Steve_Haley is the developer of iOS CC. At the moment he is deeply under water with other "life issues", but at some point he will chime in.

BTW: I suspect that if you turn genre off then turn it on again then the empty items will disappear, assuming that empty items is the problem. That process should reconstruct the database with current metadata.

[jensenholmes]

Originally Posted by chaley

I am confused. I thought you wanted to remove the Genre group because it contains no entries.
Are you saying instead that iOS CC is showing Genre items that have no books? Android CC doesn't do that. I would argue that showing empty item lines is a bug, just as not cutting the genre items apart at the comma is a bug.

My son Steve_Haley is the developer of iOS CC. At the moment he is deeply under water with other "life issues", but at some point he will chime in.

BTW: I suspect that if you turn genre off then turn it on again then the empty items will disappear, assuming that empty items is the problem. That process should reconstruct the database with current metadata.

No, I wasn't wanting to remove the entire Genre group. I'm trying to get my Genres down to a reasonable list that can be scrolled and has value instead of a ginormous list of things with 1 or 2 items each. As I posted in my original post on this thread, CC imported my books in multiple genres in a weird way that gives me tons of extra entries under the Genre tab. I'm reassigning books to only one Genre and 'sending them to device' again, but since the empty list items still appear, it doesn't help.

I did turn off and turn back on "Genre" and even hit "reset list" on CC, but it didn't seem to recalculate (happened instantly) and the empty items are still there. At this point I think I probably need to delete what's on my ipad and reinstall the whole library from scratch. I'm guessing I'd need to deleted the CC app from my ipad and resinstall it? Hopefully it won't remember my old settings.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by jensenholmes

No, I wasn't wanting to remove the entire Genre group. I'm trying to get my Genres down to a reasonable list that can be scrolled and has value instead of a ginormous list of things with 1 or 2 items each. As I posted in my original post on this thread, CC imported my books in multiple genres in a weird way that gives me tons of extra entries under the Genre tab. I'm reassigning books to only one Genre and 'sending them to device' again, but since the empty list items still appear, it doesn't help.

If it is anything like the Android app, simply connecting it as a wireless device to calibre should update all of the metadata for books in CC. Which should in turn ensure there is no metadata or tag without a book.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by DoctorOhh

If it is anything like the Android app, simply connecting it as a wireless device to calibre should update all of the metadata for books in CC. Which should in turn ensure there is no metadata or tag without a book.

I am rather sure there is a bug where items are not removed if after metadata update they don't point at any books. It is easy to see how this would be missed because a) item values don't go away that often and then b) someone would need to notice.

I had a similar bug in the Android version that remained hidden for a long time. The items weren't shown because the "fetch" tossed away zero values but they were being left in the DB, causing the DB to grow for no reason.

[Steve_Haley]

Hi, I'm the guy working on the iOS app. If the Android version had a bug around this for a long time, I probably accidentally replicated it in the iOS one as well. I'll have a look on the weekend; my job is really busy at the moment.

[Steve_Haley]

Hello again; there was indeed a bug in CC that made it not remove grouping options for empty custom columns. I've just fixed that. I'll see if I can do something about the hierarchical columns not working tomorrow; it looks like 95% of the code is there to make them work, but evidently whoever wrote that part forgot to finish it! If I can't get it working tomorrow, I'll still publish the bug fix above rather than waiting until both are ready.

[Steve_Haley]

Hello yet again! Turns out I'd misread slightly the issue at hand; this is about comma-separated column values rather than hierarchical columns. I've just finished making CC iOS support comma separated column values, as well as making it clean up empty values from the grouping/filtering drawer.

I'm uploading it to Apple now; they've been reviewing apps pretty quickly for the last few months, but there's usually a big rush of submissions in December. Hopefully it will still be available in a few days' time.