[Enhancement] calibre:// book-details option

[kovidgoyal]

Sounds reasonable to me. Lets get the link support merged first, then we can finalise this.

[BetterRed]

@chaley - hope it's not too late for an early morning, late breaking thought.

Rather than appending clickable ' (detail)' if a Link field is set, append/prepend an icon instead - some people put qualifiers in parentheses, e.g. creator roles -- Fred Bloggs (Trans), Bill Brown (Illus).

Suggested icon - Circled L.

BR

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@chaley - hope it's not too late for an early morning, late breaking thought.

Rather than appending clickable ' (detail)' if a Link field is set, append/prepend an icon instead - some people put qualifiers in parentheses, e.g. creator roles -- Fred Bloggs (Trans), Bill Brown (Illus).

Suggested icon - Circled L.

BR

I think I can offer an image/tool button there because Book details is an HTML "page". But if I can ...

What does the qualifier (translator etc) have to do with it? Are you suggesting something less specific than "details"?

Or suggesting that some parsing happen on the author text to offer a series of icons for the other roles?

Note that we are considering allowing the user to add a rich text document instead of a link. I suspect you would want a different icon in that case.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by chaley

I think I can offer an image/tool button there because Book details is an HTML "page". But if I can ...

What does the qualifier (translator etc) have to do with it? Are you suggesting something less specific than "details"?

Or suggesting that some parsing happen on the author text to offer a series of icons for the other roles?

Nothing that complicated. IMO this:

Fred Bloggs (Trans) , Bill Brown (Illus) .

looks better and the clickable elements are better distinguished than this:

Fred Bloggs (Trans) (detail), Bill Brown (Illus) (detail).

Originally Posted by chaley

Note that we are considering allowing the user to add a rich text document instead of a link. I suspect you would want a different icon in that case.

Not sure what a rich text document would be in this context, presumably something other an .rtf file referenced by a file:/// link.

I would be happy with a single icon for all Links irrespective of the protocol, who knows when I might stumble on a WAIS server.

BR

Note: I had a globe icon - but the board ate them, so the light bulb is illustrative.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Not sure what a rich text document would be in this context, presumably something other an .rtf file referenced by a file:/// link.

The document would be stored in the link field, or something like that. The user could use this to add a document directly to the link instead of linking to a file.

[BetterRed]

a Comment like object in the database - but with a 'category column/row id' instead of a 'book id'.

BR

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

a Comment like object in the database - but with a 'category column/row id' instead of a 'book id'.

BR

Yes. The details are being worked out. It could be in a new table, or it could be stored in the link column of the existing tables. We also want to store images referred to by the documents, avoiding any file:// references.

[capink]

I don't know whether this is relevant to the discussion at hand or not, but I will give it a go anyway:

I always thought that categories like authors, tags ... etc should have the same api as books (set_field, field_metadata ... etc). That way we can easily reuse other tools like library view, cover view, search and replace ...etc.

Not sure if that is possible or practical.

[ownedbycats]

There is author links, so I could see that being expanded.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by capink

I don't know whether this is relevant to the discussion at hand or not, but I will give it a go anyway:

I always thought that categories like authors, tags ... etc should have the same api as books (set_field, field_metadata ... etc). That way we can easily reuse other tools like library view, cover view, search and replace ...etc.

Not sure if that is possible or practical.

Thanks for the thoughts.

I spent some weeks thinking about this and came to the conclusion that it wasn't practical. My idea was to have "libraries" of items per category that could reference each other through links. I gave up after looking at the massive number of changes, such as having several "libraries" open at the same time and maintaining column structure. Smaller things like how search would work gave me headaches.

BetterRed's idea of using real separate meta-metadata libraries with the ability to show details from those other libraries in the "main" library gets most of the way there without massive changes.

Adding the ability to refer to local "documents" from category links provides a second simpler to understand mechanism to keep unstructured meta-metadata within the same library. Perhaps it might need some kind of search mechanism, for which Kovid suggested something like is used for FTS.

Kovid has reviewed the "links everywhere" database changes and db API to maintain them. He will look at the "remote book details" stuff and other UI changes when time permits.

[capink]

Originally Posted by chaley

BetterRed's idea of using real separate meta-metadata libraries with the ability to show details from those other libraries in the "main" library gets most of the way there without massive changes.

That would actually work for what I have in mind. Using this, I maybe able to add a plugin action to the context menu of the categories to open a library view of the authors instead of the "Manage authors" window. From there I might be able to use other tools such as search and replace.

This leaves some other things I might try when I have time:

• Figure out a way to auto link authors (and other categories) instead of doing it manually. Re-using code from the Find Duplicates plugin can help with that.
• Adding a button or some mechanism to translate a search from the author library to a corresponding search in the books library. For example the following search from the author library:
  

  #nationality:russian

  should translate into something like that in the books library
  
  

  authors:"=Leo Tolstoy" or authors:"=Fyodor Dostoyevsky"

Edit: Instead of search, would be better to add a context menu item (in authors library) to show books by selected authors in the books library (using the search above)

[chaley]

Originally Posted by capink

Edit: Instead of search, would be better to add a context menu item (in authors library) to show books by selected authors in the books library (using the search above)

That would be good. The calibre search link gives you the mechanism. I suspect you would want some sort of mechanism to allow the author and their pen names. If the pen names are in an is-names custom column then the implementation is straight forward. The UI might be interesting -- the search might depend on knowing what sort of library you are in and what library is the "main" (target) one.

What this is really talking about is cross-linking between the libraries. This isn't straight forward. For example, BetterRed mentions having several "base" libraries (journals, comics, books, etc) that refer to meta-metadata libraries (authors, publishers, etc). Providing a UI that people can understand to specify all that makes my head hurt. It might be that the user must provide the relationships so the plugin (or whatever) knows how to generate the links.

Talking about this is fun. It also helps me push dementia further into the future.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by capink

Adding a button or some mechanism to translate a search from the author library to a corresponding search in the books library. For example the following search from the author library:

#nationality:russian

should translate into something like that in the books library

authors:"=Leo Tolstoy" or authors:"=Fyodor Dostoyevsky"

Another use-case I can think of: Authors that are actually company names (I see this mostly for various manuals and documentation) could be marked as such.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by capink

That would actually work for what I have in mind. Using this, I maybe able to add a plugin action to the context menu of the categories to open a library view of the authors instead of the "Manage authors" window.

FTR: I open my Creators library by clicking the Author name in Book Details, or by selecting View author link in the CalibreSpy context menu. Manage Authors is only used to set the calibre:\\show-book link.

BR

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by capink

Edit: Instead of search, would be better to add a context menu item (in authors library) to show books by selected authors in the books library (using the search above)

In my Creators library I put a calibre://search link to the library in which the person has most (often all) of their content into the Authors link link field - so for Hilary Mantel the search is to my Books library, for Marie Louise Mclaws it's my Periodicals library - if they have content in multiple I put the extra calibre://search links in a long-text column called… Links.

BTW: my Books library authors J. K. Rowling and Peter Galbraith link to Joanne Rowling in my Creators library. Ditto Swift's pseudonyms, and Arabic writers Kunya names.

BR