Add Column Icon to all Author’s Books if…

[madeleinelevy]

Let’s say my database contains 10 books by author John Smith. One of these books won a notable award, and is therefore tagged “winner”. This tag will allow for an icon to be added next to his name.

Is there a way to mark all remaining books by the same author with a second icon signify that this is an author of some importance, but without adding an extra tag?

I understand that I could simply add an additional tag to all non-winning books, even something simple such as a + sign, but that might require some maintenance down the line that I would prefer to avoid.

Example included.

[HarryT]

Sorry, what "database" are you referring to? If your question relates to a specific device or tool, you should ask it in the appropriate forum for that device or tool. Nobody is going to know what you're talking about if you ask here.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Sorry, what "database" are you referring to? If your question relates to a specific device or tool, you should ask it in the appropriate forum for that device or tool. Nobody is going to know what you're talking about if you ask here.

It looks like Calibre, but I'm not sure.

[Katja_hbg]

Does this help
In setting choose first icon. last tab will be «colum symbol»
Add rule eg. add icon without text, into column xx, if column yy is equal zz

[JSWolf]

I think it's Calibre and thus the thread should be moved. The screen grab looks like it's Calibre.

[madeleinelevy]

Should have payed more attention, I thought I was in the Calibre Forum.
Sorry about that.

Can someone move it over or do I need to re-post elsewhere?

Thanks

[madeleinelevy]

Thanks Katja. Will Work on it.

[HarryT]

Moved to the Calibre forum.

[chaley]

If I understand the question properly then the answer is no. Calibre's column icon and column coloring feature uses the template language, which can interrogate the metadata for the book in question, not other books that share metadata. In other words, the template language cannot answer the question "does some other book by this author have the XXX tag?"

That said, one of DaltonST's plugins might be able to help. They provide a large grab bag of features. I have no idea if one of them might be a way to express cross-book queries.

If you choose to go with adding information (the "tag"), I suggest that you dedicate a custom column to it. That way you don't pollute the tags with what is really administrative information. It also could make maintenance easier.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by chaley

If I understand the question properly then the answer is no. Calibre's column icon and column coloring feature uses the template language, which can interrogate the metadata for the book in question, not other books that share metadata. In other words, the template language cannot answer the question "does some other book by this author have the XXX tag?"

That said, one of DaltonST's plugins might be able to help. They provide a large grab bag of features. I have no idea if one of them might be a way to express cross-book queries.

If you choose to go with adding information (the "tag"), I suggest that you dedicate a custom column to it. That way you don't pollute the tags with what is really administrative information. It also could make maintenance easier.

@chaley - can this be done (maybe we've been here before)

• create a User Category for Important Authors,
• interrogate the Important Authors list in a true/false composite column template (function mode maybe ?) -- #is_important/Is Important
• then use the value of the #is_important composite column in the icon rule.

BR

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@chaley - can this be done (maybe we've been here before)

• create a User Category for Important Authors,
• interrogate the Important Authors list in a true/false composite column template (function mode maybe ?) -- #is_important/Is Important
• then use the value of the #is_important composite column in the icon rule.

BR

You are correct, this can work, but I make no guarantees about performance. It could be very slow, depending on how well calibre's caching works.

To fill out your example:

1. Create a user category, which for this example we will call 'Important Authors'. This should not be a hierarchical category.
2. Put some authors into the new user category.
3. Make a custom column "built from other columns. Name it whatever you want. For this example I will use #important. Set "Show Checkmarks" if you want visible confirmation. Set the template to
   

   {:'str_in_list(user_categories(), ',', 'Important Authors', 'Yes', 'No')'}

4. Create a rule that checks #important for "Yes".

Note that this technique will work with any category value you put in the user category. For example, if you put a series into the category then #important will be "Yes" for all books in that series.

If you want to use a hierarchical category then two things must be true.

1. The outermost category name (Important Authors) must be unique. It cannot be a substring of any other category or subcategory name.
2. Use this template:
   

   {:'contains(user_categories(), 'Important Authors', 'Yes', 'No')'}

[BetterRed]

@chaley -

@madeleinelevy - I hope this gives you what you want.

I suggest you install the User Categories plugin, it will allow addition and removal of Authors to/from the Important Authors UC from the book list, thus avoiding having to dodge in and out of the Tag Browser->Configuration menu when you want to add or remove an Author to the list. I find it works best from the context menu.

BR

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@chaley -

Thinking about it, one can avoid making the composite column by using an advanced rule in coloring/icons.

I suggest you install the User Categories plugin, it will allow addition and removal of Authors to/from the Important Authors UC from the book list, thus avoiding having to dodge in and out of the Tag Browser->Configuration menu when you want to add or remove an Author to the list. I find it works best from the context menu.

BR

I use drag-n-drop. Click on the "thing" (the author, series, what-have-you), release the click, then click/drag that value onto the user category name in the tag browser.

[BetterRed]

@chaley - l'll let the OP try the Advanced Rule route.

I implemented the custom column solution on an 8347 book library, start up time was 5.5 secs - library is on WD Caviar Black HDD, config is on a Toshiba HG6 SSD. That seems good enough to me.

Because it's not keyboard navigable I rarely show the tag browser tree - unless of course I want to Manage Authors, Tags etc. When I first started using calibre it sort of was, as was book details - sort of


Can anyone tell me what the following line in debug is about. I haven't had an Apple anything since a IIe and Lisa 30 years ago, and I have never installed the Fanficfare plugin. And the file doesn't exist, see attachment

macmenuhack file_path:C:\_Calibre\Configuration_64bit\plugins\ fanficfare_macmenuhack.txt.

calibre Debug log

Spoiler:

calibre 2.85.1 [64bit] embedded-python: True is64bit: True
Windows-8-6.2.9200 Windows ('64bit', 'WindowsPE')
('Windows', '8', '6.2.9200')
Python 2.7.9
Windows: ('8', '6.2.9200', '', 'Multiprocessor Free')
DEBUG: 0.0 GetFileName::__init__.py - loading translations
DEBUG: 0.0 GetFileName::__init__.py - loading translations
Successfully initialized third party plugins: Drop Search Results (1, 0, 8) && EpubCheck (0, 1, 2) && Quality Check (1, 9, 11) && Count Pages (1, 8, 0) && GetFileName (0, 0, 12) && Favourites Menu (1, 0, 4) && Resize Cover (1, 0, 3) && Extract ISBN (1, 4, 4) && Diaps Editing Toolbag (0, 3, 4) && Generate Cover (1, 5, 21) && EpubMerge (2, 1, 1) && Modify ePub (1, 3, 13) && View Manager (1, 3, 2) && Barnes & Noble (1, 2, 14) && Find Duplicates (1, 6, 3) && EpubSplit (2, 2, 1) && Reading List (1, 6, 6) && Goodreads (1, 1, 12) && Beam Ebooks (1, 0, 0) && User Category (1, 5, 3)
devicePixelRatio: 1.0
logicalDpi: 96.0 x 96.0
physicalDpi: 94.1467181467 x 94.0740740741
Starting up...
EpubMerge: DEBUG: 2017-07-07 19:03:42,163: calibre_plugins.epubmerge.epubmerge_plugin(152): macmenuhack file_path:C:\_Calibre\Configuration_64bit\plugins\ fanficfare_macmenuhack.txt
Started up in 5.49 seconds with 8347 books

BR

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@chaley - l'll let the OP try the Advanced Rule route.

The attached image shows how to do it with an advanced rule.

Here is the template text shown in the image. The "Foo Bar" is there because that is the name of my test user category.

program:
	contains(user_categories(), 'Foo Bar', 'ok.png', '')

The advanced rule must return the name of an icon file, in this example ok.png, or the empty string for no icon.