populate one ID from another?

[robcohen]

Hi,
I have books that have ISBN but no amazon: (ASIN) identifiers. For only those books I would like to populate the amazon: ID to be the same value as the ISBN. Other combinations should not be changed.

What's the easiest way to accomplish this? Can it be accomplished with a search/replace and with a regular expression with this post as a starting point? I'm thinking not because there doesn't seem to be a way to search for more than one identifier type - my logic is:

if isbn: has non-blank value and amazon: is blank
  then amazon: = isbn:

Or is it the sort of thing I'd have to do with functions in template program mode? Not quite sure if single function mode could accomplish this or can it?

Incidentally, I've added custom columns ISBN & ASIN so I can easily see which books have these values poplulated: ISBN: {identifiers:select(isbn)} and ASIN: {identifiers:select(amazon)}
Would the contents of my custom columns make it any easier to populate the missing values? I guess maybe I'm asking if there's a way to specify the contents of the second column as exactly the value of the first iff ASIN is blank and have that reflect in the metadata ids section as amazon:...value from ISBN...?

thanks for any assistance!
Rob

[robcohen]

Hi,
I've figured out how to do what I want. Had created a custom field the other day called ASIN that's based off the amazon: field in Ids {identifiers:select(amazon)}

Then I used search

#asin:false and isbn:true

on the main window to select just the books that have an isbn but no ASIN. For my purposes any number will work as the ASIN in order to sync Kindle's furthest read page so I can read the same book on multiple devices without losing my place. Some of my books have an ASIN populated by another process see this thread.

Then I selected all the books in this list and used Edit Metadata in bulk with Search and replace and a regular expression. Either of these seem to give me the desired result.

After posting the original note I looked closer at a number of individual threads here for ideas and realized there was a way to properly qualify the rows I wanted to change before using the search/replace in metadata.

I love Calibre more than ever!

Rob