CC feature request: hierarchical items

[Dopedangel]

I am not sure if i should make a separate thread or request here.
But anyway would it be possible to have grouping and sub grouping in calibre companion Search restrictions are good for calibre but in a device like a tablet where you are actually opening books with I think hierarchical system would be better for example
I choose a tag

Fantasy I should get 3 options 1. Authors 2. Sub Genre 3. Series
If I select an authors and then select and Author I should get 1. Series and below all the other titles he has written.
If I select 2. Sub Genre I should get 1. Authors 2. Series
If I select 3. Series I should get all the series of the genre listed

Another thing many of us use a yes no column for marking books read an ability to hide read book would also be nice something like we get in the media system xbmc

[chaley]

Moderator Notice
Moved to its own thread

I have thought about this in the past. It makes a lot of sense to respect the levels of a hierarchical item. Unfortunately it isn't easy to do. For performance reasons we keep the possible 2-level hierarchy (first letters, items with those first letters) in the database. The code would drastically change because we would now have N levels. Another problem is that the metadata for a book does not specify which columns are hierarchical. This is specified on a library basis, so we would need to remember what library a book came from. I will keep studying the issue. Perhaps some day a good solution will appear out of the ether.

As for hiding read books, why not delete them off the device? I suppose that you might want to keep your entire library on your device, which makes deleting books undesirable. Another solution would be to create that yes/no column in calibre and maintain it there. You would then use search in CC to select read or unread books. All of CC's sorting and grouping functions work on a search subset.

The "Read" item brings us back to a discussion we had in a thread some time back: the ability to pass metadata back from CC to calibre. This isn't something that calibre currently supports. As noted in that other post, I can in theory add that support to calibre, but then I need to determine how to do it in a way that is not too CC-specific and that won't cause calibre to blow up. I also need to work out how to deal with simultaneous changes to the data. Yet again: I am still thinking about it.

[Dopedangel]

Forget the hierarchical tags for a moment. Just going from Tags to Authors to Titles would be nice compared to browsing thru all the fantasty books or maybe its just me and my being used to using folders so want something like that. But I really think a library app should be more intuitive you select a genre you get all the authors in the genre you select an author you get all the book by that author in that genre.
Well if you ever get to it that would be great. Anyway my main reader was a rooted nook touch so I didn't use calibre companion much but now that I broke its screen I am using my phone. Once I get my nook touch replacement I will forget about this till the next time I have a calibre compatible device truthfully I am quite happy with the save to device you helped me create but calbire companions ability to view book summaries is something that is really tempting

{tags:re([\.],/!)|!|}/{authors[0]}/{authors}/{series:subitems(0,1)||/}{series_index:0>5.2f| | - }{series:subitems(1,10)| | - }{title}

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Dopedangel

Forget the hierarchical tags for a moment. Just going from Tags to Authors to Titles would be nice compared to browsing thru all the fantasty books or maybe its just me and my being used to using folders so want something like that. But I really think a library app should be more intuitive you select a genre you get all the authors in the genre you select an author you get all the book by that author in that genre.

Ahhh, I misunderstood.

CC browses in the same way that calibre does -- items to books (titles). Like calibre, it does not support items to authors to books.

You can get much of what you want by using CC's search. For example, search for "tag:=fantasy". Because CC's searches are more like calibre's restrictions, you can then group by author or series or whatever to browse your library how you want, seeing items from books only that match the search

Thinking about it, it might be nice to make that search easier and faster by allowing a long-press on any item (tag, series, author, custom field, etc). The long-press would do a search for that item, after which you could browse. Given the recent CC change to "turn off" a search by tapping on the list header, browsing this way would be quite fast. The search would be very fast because it could be implemented using a database query instead of a scan. There are some complexities, such as how to display the "current search". I need to reflect some more about this.

Does anyone think that this "search via long-press" would be useful?

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by chaley

Does anyone think that this "search via long-press" would be useful?

I haven't used search in CC, but if this was implemented it would be a feature I would try and perhaps use regularly.

[chaley]

OK, I have a prototype implementation, and I want to sanity check it before I go on. I will do this with a set of screen captures.

The first shows grouping by tags/first letter.


The second shows the result of a long press on "S". This is the dialog that you see, giving you the choice of finding all books that match the item or all books that do not match the item.


I tapped the "Matching" button, which says find books with a tag beginning with "S". The books have other tags, so those tags are shown as well. The header shows the calibre- and CC-equivalent search.

If I wanted to I could change the grouping to by Series, by Author, or by anything. I could even turn off grouping. I would see only the books that have a tag beginning with S. This behavior is like calibre's restriction, in case you have ever used that. @Dopedangel: this is how you would view authors of books tagged with "Fantasy". You would long tap on Fantasy, select "Matching" to get the books with that tag, then group by Authors.

The next screen shows what happens if I tap "Not matching", which finds all books without a tag beginning with "S". The header now has a "not" in the search string to tell you what it is doing. Note that there are no longer any "S" tags in the list, which is good because we asked for books with no tags beginning with "S".


For the next screen, I cleared the search and then tapped on the tag "S" to open the list of tags beginning with S. I see three tags, one of which is not related to science fiction.


I then long tapped on "Space Opera" and chose "Match", which selected all books with that tag. All my books with the tag "Space Opera" also have the tag "Science Fiction".


The last screen shows what I see if I chose "Not match". I see all the books that do not have the tag "Space Opera". Note that the list of books with the Science Fiction tag is different from the screen shot above, because it is now showing books with "Science Fiction" but without "Space Opera". The non-fiction tag also appeared.


Does this make sense to people? I know that it is hard to really know what something does without being able to play with it, but it would be a shame if I got this wrong coming out of the gate.