KoboTouch: Plugboards from series_index to SeriesNumber

[ownedbycats]

On the Kobo device, the SeriesNumber row in the content table is a text column rather than an integer or float. Both null results and things like "1-4" are valid entries.

There's two things I'd like to know if are possible to do via plugboards:

1. For series omnibuses, I use series_indexes of x.y — 1.04 or 5.07. Is it possible to replace the period with a dash and remove the extra 0 to display as 1-4 on the Kobo?

2. For unnumbered series, I use a series_index of 0.0. This means a lot of "Series Name - 0"s on my device. Is it possible to return a null value instead?

[chaley]

For both #1 and #2, the answer is no. The plugboard sets the series_index in a copy of the book's metadata. That index is a floating point value, and can only accept floating point values. It might be possible to set it to python None (would require a python template). I strongly suspect this won't work. If it doesn't fail in the plugboard then I don't know what the device driver would do with it.

It is possible that the 2-decimal-digit limitation can be ignored, but given the number of moving parts I don't know what will happen on the device, or even if the behavior is deterministic. If this interests you then try it and see.

[ownedbycats]

Ah - I was afraid of that. I think at least #2 I can run a sqlite query on the database itself after Calibre's done syncing metadata.