suggestion: tag groups should use Calibre tag hierarchy

[comox]

New user loving your app. CC is near perfection but I have a suggestion that would make it even better. My apologies if this has already been discussed here but a quick search turned up nothing.

I make heavy use of Calibre's hierarchical tags. For example:

Fiction
Fiction.Mystery
Fiction.Thriller
Non-Fiction
Non-Fiction.History
Non-Fiction.Cookbook
Non-Fiction.Cookbook.French
Non-Fiction.Cookbook.Italian

This makes it possible to conveniently navigate a complex tag structure and to easily filter on useful subsets of books such as:

- all fiction books
- all non-fiction books
- all cookbooks
- all Italian cookbooks

I'm finding that your flattened treatment of hierarchical tags in the group browser creates a lot of clutter and makes navigation much more difficult than navigating the same tags in Calibre.

I am hoping you might address this in a future release.

[kaufman]

Wow, I had no idea Calibre could do this. Very cool. Thanks for the info.

Now I am going to have to go through all my tags and redo them as a hierarchy. I can certainly see how it would be useful to have this in CC as well.

[comox]

It's a great Calibre feature. Once you get the hang of organizing hierarchically you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

I should have mentioned that the best iOS device companion to Calibre is Marvin and it also suffers from a flat tag structure.

[chaley]

This feature is on the wish list already and has been for some time. Unfortunately it is hard to do. When I built hierarchical columns in calibre it took me weeks to make it work, and that was with having no memory or CPU constraints.

I am still thinking about alternate approaches that might make it practical in CC.

[kaufman]

Originally Posted by chaley

I am still thinking about alternate approaches that might make it practical in CC.

Two thoughts:

1) Perhaps it can be made somewhat easier on the CC side because it is a read only effort. Perhaps it can even use some of the information already calculated on the Calibre side. Could calibre be modified to send over the hierarchy information with the metadata?

2) Is its a depth issue, perhaps it can be simplified by limiting the depth to 2 or 3 levels.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kaufman

Two thoughts:

1) Perhaps it can be made somewhat easier on the CC side because it is a read only effort. Perhaps it can even use some of the information already calculated on the Calibre side. Could calibre be modified to send over the hierarchy information with the metadata?

That isn't the problem. The real issue, beyond the one mentioned below, is virtual nodes. If you have Foo.Bar and Foo.Mumble, then there is a line for Foo but zero books have that tag. Fixing that requires creating tags that aren't there, something I had to do in calibre when I built the temporary in-memory tables that drive the tag browser.

2) Is its a depth issue, perhaps it can be simplified by limiting the depth to 2 or 3 levels.

The issue is that CC has max depth == 1. Going from 1 to "more than one" requires an almost complete redesign of the category tables and the queries that use them.

[kaufman]

Got it. That does sound like a lot of work. Having said that, you have pretty much done almost all of the realistic requests in the wish list, so you might find yourself bored and looking for a project to do soon.



I'm going to update my tags to support this, so if you do it, I will be ready to test it.

[comox]

Thanks for responding. I understand the complexity. It would be a killer enhancement so I hope you might chip away at it when time permits.

Perhaps you might consider a simpler interim improvement?

One consequence of using hierarchical tags is that the total tag length can become quite long. On my Samsung Galaxy S III with its 720x1280 display almost all of my tags are too long to be read on one line and must be wrapped.

The logic you are using to wrap tags produces displeasing results sometimes.

For example, the tag "Non-Fiction.Food.Cookbook.Dietary.Vegetarian" is displayed as:

Non-
Fiction.Food.Cookbook.Dietary.Vegetaria
n [7 books]

I think a huge improvement would result from you adding "." to the list of characters that are preferred for line breaks so this tag would display as:

Non-Fiction.Food.Cookbook.Dietary.
Vegetarian [7 books]

There seems to be an additional problem. In landscape mode tag wrapping displays all of the tag across multiple lines as expected. However in portrait mode a few characters (3 max I think) prior to the wrap line break are cut off from view.

[comox]

Sorry, noticed one other possible problem in the line wrap logic.

The tag: "Non-Fiction.Food.Cookbook.Dietary.Low-Carb" displays as:

Non-
Fiction.Food.Cookbook.Dietary.Low-Carb
[3 books]

It seems the logic should be changed to use the last preferred line break character (in this case "-") rather than the first so it would display as:

Non-Fiction.Food.Cookbook.Dietary.Low-
Carb [3 books]

[chaley]

@comox: I don't wrap the lines, Android does. There might be a way for me to influence how it does the wrapping, but I don't know what those ways might be and a quick search produces no hints.

As for the characters at the end being lost, I suspect that I have already fixed it as part of adding the scrollers. We will see ...

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by chaley

... The real issue, beyond the one mentioned below, is virtual nodes. If you have Foo.Bar and Foo.Mumble, then there is a line for Foo but zero books have that tag. Fixing that requires creating tags that aren't there, something I had to do in calibre when I built the temporary in-memory tables that drive the tag browser.

The issue is that CC has max depth == 1. Going from 1 to "more than one" requires an almost complete redesign of the category tables and the queries that use them.

&

@chaley - when designing the hierarchical tags feature, did you consider offering the option of using a controlled vocabulary.

Speaking for myself I would rather design and maintain (or acquire) a discrete CV, rather than creating and destroying tags in the processing of assigning them to a book.

I like and use Hindsight's Metamachine for images. Of some note is that it does synonyms - e.g. spaceman, astronaut, cosmonaut.

Image management seems to be lightrooms ahead of books in this regard

BR

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

&

@chaley - when designing the hierarchical tags feature, did you consider offering the option of using a controlled vocabulary.

Nope. Not something that I use.

[chaley]

After some discussion in-house, I decided to do a single-level hierarchy implementation for this. The advantage is that it was possible in the current CC structure. The disadvantage is that it separates only one level.

It works by considering the first level of the hierarchy as a "first letter". Items that are not hierarchical (do not contain a period) show up under their normal first letter. Hierarchical items show up under the first level of the hierarchy with a period appended to distinguish it from an non-hierarchical entry. See the attached screen capture.

When you tap on a hierarchical item "first name" you see all the items in that hierarchy. There is no further hierarchical control. Again, see the screen capture.

I recognize that this scheme isn't ideal, but it is what I can build and is better than nothing.

BTW: I can't change the names of the subitems to remove the first level of the hierarchy because that would break clicking on tags in book details.

[Terisa de morgan]

I have a question. Is this only for tags or for any column? I mean, my tags are in this way: "Romance / Paranormal" (because I use it for another things out of calibre), but I have a genre (and theme) column with would be hierarchical.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

I have a question. Is this only for tags or for any column? I mean, my tags are in this way: "Romance / Paranormal" (because I use it for another things out of calibre), but I have a genre (and theme) column with would be hierarchical.

Any text column (tags, custom text, custom text like tags, and custom built from other columns). I added a setting in the groups section where you specify which columns in the grouping drawer should be treated this way.

The screen captures show it being used on my test #genre column.