[GUI Plugin] Action Chains

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

That's good. I once had a cross-platform program mistakenly save a file with a colon, which is illegal in Windows. I had to use a Linux boot disk to get rid of the damn thing.

Colons are not exactly illegal in Windows/NTFS, they are used to denote alternate data streams (file forks), e.g. myfile.txt:mystream. Nirsoft's AlternateStreamView can be used to to extract and delete them while Notepad is one of the few programs that can create/edit them.

BR

[compurandom]

I've got a chain that randomly does stuff I don't want. I'm working on debugging it, but I'm thinking it would be nice to have some tools for debugging chains.

What I'm wishing I had right now is a button (on each line) in the chain editor to run the action. That would let me run each item to make sure it does what I think it should be doing.

[ownedbycats]

An option to toggle actions on and off without deleting them would work, too; you could toggle them all off and then toggle them all one at a time until you find the mistake.

[capink]

Will take this into consideration for the future.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by compurandom

I've got a chain that randomly does stuff I don't want. I'm working on debugging it, but I'm thinking it would be nice to have some tools for debugging chains.

What I'm wishing I had right now is a button (on each line) in the chain editor to run the action. That would let me run each item to make sure it does what I think it should be doing.

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

An option to toggle actions on and off without deleting them would work, too; you could toggle them all off and then toggle them all one at a time until you find the mistake.

Maybe have a "single step" mode? This would use a non-modal dialog so the user can interact with the library while the chain is running, in order to see what is happening. The idea: for each action in the chain:

• Run the condition and display the results. Wait for Continue/Cancel.
• Display the scope criteria. You could "Mark" the books in the scope, or maybe select them. Wait for Continue/Cancel. On "continue", ensure that the scope is applied, which might mean checking the selection in the library.
• Run the action. Where it makes sense, such as single-field edit, show the results somehow, possibly in the dialog, possibly using marks. Wait for Continue/Cancel.

This would certainly be a fair amount of work, but would provide a lot of flexibility.

[capink]

Originally Posted by chaley

Maybe have a "single step" mode? This would use a non-modal dialog so the user can interact with the library while the chain is running, in order to see what is happening. The idea: for each action in the chain:

• Run the condition and display the results. Wait for Continue/Cancel.
• Display the scope criteria. You could "Mark" the books in the scope, or maybe select them. Wait for Continue/Cancel. On "continue", ensure that the scope is applied, which might mean checking the selection in the library.
• Run the action. Where it makes sense, such as single-field edit, show the results somehow, possibly in the dialog, possibly using marks. Wait for Continue/Cancel.

This would certainly be a fair amount of work, but would provide a lot of flexibility.

I was thinking along the same lines. More specifically, something like the break points you introduced to the template dialog.

As for displaying the results, was wondering if something like the quick view can be re-used to display the results. If not maybe develop something similar.

Anyway, as you said it is going to be a fair bit of work and it will take sometime before I start working on this.

[capink]

Version 1.8.3

• Update: Experimental: new "Chain Caller" action.
• Minor changes.

The new Chain Caller action is experimental and will only appear if you switch on the experimental feature of the plugin using this tweak (calibre > preferences > tweaks > plugin tweaks):

action_chains_experimental = True

The action validates the settings to guard against infinite recursion.

Note: Experimental features can be removed or changed in the future.

[ownedbycats]

What kind of chains could create infinite recursion?

[capink]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

What kind of chains could create infinite recursion?

Circular dependency.

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

- Start ActionChain#1
- It calls ActionChain#2
- But then that calls ActionChain#1
- Which again calls ActionChain#2
- And once again, it calls ActionChain#1...

I don't think there's any good way to halt a chain in progress, is there?

[ownedbycats]

Thanks Also thanks for making the plugin. It's saved me at least a few thousand clicks at this point. probably more.

This might've been answered before, but were there any plans of enabling scopes for Calibre actions?

[capink]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Thanks Also thanks for making the plugin. It's saved me at least a few thousand clicks at this point. probably more.

You are welcome. Really appreciate that.

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

This might've been answered before, but were there any plans of enabling scopes for Calibre actions?

Unfortunately that is out of the plugin's control. It calls Calibre Actions and if the target action is selection based, it currently can not do anything to change that.

[ownedbycats]

Is there a way to copy a specific action from one chain to a different one, or merging chains? Mostly for copying stuff over from a test chain to a working one.

[capink]

No there is not. You have to copy the templates themselves. You can use the newly added save and load buttons in the template editor for this.

[capink]

Version 1.8.4

• Update: Events: Store event arguments as chain variable _event_args.
• Update: New Template Functions: field_names() and field_metadata()
• Minor Fixes.

Event arguments are document in this post. Currently the only event that passes arguments is the "Library View Double Clicked" Event. It passes the book_id and column name, so it can be utilized to launch different actions depending on the column that is double clicked.

New Template Functions are always documented in this post.

[SoccerDad91016]

Updated the Action Chains plugin to version 1.8.4 and now Calibre will not start. I get the startup banner, then the main window flashes briefly and closes. I don't see any tasks in taskmanager either.

When I run Calibre in Debug (calibre-debug -g 1>> log.txt 2>&1), I get the following error in the log file...

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "calibre_plugins.action_chains.events.base", line 49, in run
File "calibre_plugins.action_chains.events.event_tools" , line 43, in __init__
KeyError: 'event_members'


Running Calibre v5.17 64-bit on Windows 10

Was working fine prior to the latest update