Tags - can I remove deleted tags?

[pdurrant]

I'm trying to find a book that has some new tags and some old tags. I haven't been able to find one at all.

So I'll have to pick one that has an old tag. Eye Spy, which has tag *

1. It has no tags in calibre. It shows as Synced in Calibre Books. I can still select it, but I can't force a sync - "1 selected Sync 0 Books"
2. Added TEST in calibre. Eye Spy shows as Changed in Calibre Books. Syncing... It no longer has tag * in justRead, but does have tag TEST
(Send To Calibre now shows, and wants to send Eye Spy)
3. Removed TEST tag in calibre. Calibre Books shows Eye Spy as changed. Sync. Eye Spy still has TEST in justRead
(Send To Calibre still shows, and still wants to send Eye Spy)
Calibre Books does not show Eye Spy as changed.
4. Added Fantasy tag in calibre.
(Send To Calibre still shows, and still wants to send Eye Spy)
Calibre Books shows Eye Spy as changed. Sync.
Eye Spy still has tag TEST

I send Eye Spy 'changes' to calibre.
in calibre it still has tag Fantasy
in justRead it still has tag TEST
Send to Calibre is no longer showing
Calibre Books does not show Eye SPy as changed.

I'm mystified.

[petrjahoda]

Hi, I am playing with this randomly the whole day. When I got an idea what to test, I test it.

But so far everything is working as it is supposed to, I am not able to make it work not-correctly, no matter what I do (I tried even that * as a tag, or now that * as tag, no problems).
I am doing only this: adding, removing, changing tags in Calibre and for every change I can see that the books is changed and after sync is properly updated.

Please do not play now with Sent to Calibre, let's make that one-way update work properly.

From all of your description it looks like the tags in the background are OK (because you are seeing changed or synced properly, this gets data directly from sql), but those tags are not updated in the UI. Maybe a combination of slower device and a lot of books?

Can you please make a simpler test:
- in justread Library under '...' hit Change Library and select a new empty Folder (you can of course change back afterwards)
- and sync just one and only one book from Calibre sync into this empty library, maybe even this Eye Spy, and make the same test (adding/removing tags in Calibre, sync just that one book and see if it displays properly in justRead).

[pdurrant]

OK, new empty library folder, Tag Test

Sync one book. Has Tag set in calibre ("Fantasy"). Tag appears in justRead.

1. remove all the tags in calibre and sync, does it display OK in justRead

Removed tag in calibre. Now no tags on book in calibre. Sync shows a changed book. After sync...

Book in justRead has tag &#160!
in list of all tags there's only &#160

2. add tag TEST in calibre and sync, does it display OK in justRead

Tag TEST added in calibre, sync done, book in justRead has tag TEST (and tag &#160 does not show in list of all tags - only the TEST tag)

3. remove all the tags in calibre and sync, does it display OK in justRead

tag &#160 is back again.

4. add just those tags you need in calibre and sync, does it display OK in justRead

Just the Fantasy tag is back again.


NB I never manually added the tag &#160 to this book in calibre. calibre must have read it from the metadata in the original AZW3 file or EPUB.

Could it be that when there are some tags set by calibre, you pick those up, but if no tags are set in calibre, your code goes looking for tags in the book file itself? (I'm not quite certain how the calibre sync stuff works).

[pdurrant]

After more discussions by email, Petr has helped me find the cause of the problem.

There's a bug (well, IMO a bug) in calibre. I have reported it.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/2152879

If some tags are set in the calibre database, they get written into the book sent to justRead by calibre content server.

If all tags have been deleted in the calibre database, any tags in the original EPUB get sent to justRead by calibre content server.

IMO this is a bug in calibre.

It's possible to work around it by using one of the plugins that allow you to update the metadata in the book files stored by calibre to match that in the calibre database. But that shouldn't be necessary really. If Kovid agrees that it's a bug, I hope I won't have to do that.

[petrjahoda]

More information about this: that is also a reason, why I developed a habit over the years.

Before closing Calibre, I always select all books (CTRL-A or CMD-A) and press button 'Embed Metadata' to be 100% sure that what I see in Calibre is in the files themselves.

[pdurrant]

Kovid has fixed the bug, and the fix will be in the next release of calibre!