[FanFicFare] Metadata Management for Fanfiction

[Amalthia]

Hi,

I had a follow up question about Action Chains.

Yesterday, I noticed about twenty of the titles in my Calibre were modified. However, I didn't update the metadata or anything else on the title myself.

This seemed to impact all the titles that had an "orphan_account" author from AO3.

I'm currently guessing that the Action Chain I added to move items from In-Progress to Abandoned touched on these titles since their last updated date was over a year ago. However, I'm not completely certain it's an Action Chain because I thought I had to select the title and then manually select which action to perform on the title.

Do you know any other way that so many titles could be modified without direct intervention?

Thanks,
Amalthia

[ownedbycats]

Is this the Calibre-default last-modified? It's honestly not a very accurate measure as stuff like running a Quality Check can change it. The plugin Last Modified with a custom datetime column is far more customizable.

But in this specific situation, yes, running single-field edits with Action Chains can modify it, both default and plugin. There's one exception:

Originally Posted by capink

If you want to preserve the last modified column(s), stick to templates, because unlike pre-defined option it will check with the old value before updating. Returning "else $columnname" will not count as modification.

Originally Posted by chaley

Also, in most cases the calibre db layer checks if the item is being set to itself and doesn't change last_modified.

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Is this the Calibre-default last-modified? It's honestly not a very accurate measure as stuff like running a Quality Check can change it. The plugin Last Modified with a custom datetime column is far more customizable.

But in this specific situation, yes, running single-field edits with Action Chains can modify it, both default and plugin. There's one exception:

I think this is the Calibre "modified" column, I haven't installed the plugin to manage the "Last Modified" date. Though now I'm going to check it out! maybe it'll have a log to say what last modified the title.

But if the Action Chain is only modifying a single field then how were over 20 titles modified? I didn't use any "Action Chain" modifications yesterday. Do you know if the template "Action Chains" run in the background?

I'm not 100% sure that the Action Chain did anything but I can't think of anything else that would modify titles on it's own.

Thanks for responding so quickly!
Amalthia

[ownedbycats]

Action Chains only runs on-demand. There are a few instances where it can run a chain upon an 'event' (e.g. changing virtual library tabs) but you need to deliberately set that up.

Did you recently make any changes to orphan_author except adding or removing a book? Even adding a URL (or FanFicFare doing that) can cause every book to change (last row before the summary):

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Action Chains only runs on-demand.

Did you recently make any changes to orphan_author except adding or removing a book? Even adding a URL (or FanFicFare doing that) can cause every book to change (last row before the summary):

Yesterday, I only used FanFicFare to update some anthologies and stories. I didn't do anything else due to lack of time. I did find one of the Anthologies had an "orphan_account" author, so maybe that triggered something with the rest of the "orphan_accounts?" I mean that theory makes sense, they probably all share something in the metadata.opf file.

I've installed a plugin "Audit Log" so I can monitor for the next week and see if this happens again.

Thanks for brainstorming with me and presenting some options.

Amalthia

[ownedbycats]

Yeah, I've seen mass-modifications after updating a story, especially when I re-enabled author URLs. Jim would likely know better than me what exactly all gets changed, so asking in the FFF thread might get you a better idea.

[ownedbycats]

For what it matters, here's all the Last Modified plugin options. You can set up multiple columns with different options.



Under 'book metadata changed' you can blacklist or whitelist specific columns. (Thankfully, you can ignore composite ones!)

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

For what it matters, here's all the Last Modified plugin options. You can set up multiple columns with different options.

Attachment 203188

Under 'book metadata changed' you can blacklist or whitelist specific columns. (Thankfully, you can ignore composite ones!)

Attachment 203189

I'll download this plugin too! It looks useful.