Is Heirarchy of Multiple Columns Possible?

[Steve Bradford]

I'm new to Calibre and although it seems quite powerful it's definately not intuative (needs work there, more wizards perhaps).

I've looked at the tutorial on heirarchy and it seems I can't do what I want but I may be wrong.

I've added a Genre custom column so now what I want to do is set up a heirarchy tree that is based on existing metadata columns not the period separated text values that must be manually entered to be created.

The heirarchy I'd like is:
Genre
Author
Series

These values already exist in the library so I just want them to be picked up directly and not have to be re entered as a three segment Genre.

Thanks

Steve

[Dopedangel]

I think it should be possible using a custom column generated from other columns although performance hit you will get using such a custom column in calibre will be huge as calibre will be generating the column eveytime. I don't know how to go about it myself but chaley who's baby the whole custom columns and heirarchy tags etc is might be.
BTW what are you trying to do actually as I get the need for hierarchy in your reader and that can be easily achieved using the save to system but why do you need it in calibre. If you use the tag browser and then sort calibre columns by author then series it should get you what you want I think.

[chaley]

Dopedangel has it right. You can do this with a "column made from other columns". If you library isn't too large (less than a couple thousand books), the performance should be acceptable.

The template for the new column would look something like

{genre}.{authors}.{series}

[Steve Bradford]

Thanks for the advice and the algorithm, I'd guessed that I could do it with a phony composite column but was hoping there was a cleaner and more efficient way to do it.

Perhaps allowing a multi level heirarchy dependent on existing metatdata (cols/tags) could be added at some time. That way you could have a number of views depending on the way you wanted to parse the library.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Steve Bradford

Thanks for the advice and the algorithm, I'd guessed that I could do it with a phony composite column but was hoping there was a cleaner and more efficient way to do it.

Perhaps allowing a multi level heirarchy dependent on existing metatdata (cols/tags) could be added at some time. That way you could have a number of views depending on the way you wanted to parse the library.

column sorts get biased by the previous sorted column. IIRC the tweak defaults to 5

BTW series vs authors would never work well with my collections. Way too many series that have different or multiple (or different combinations) of authors. I treat authors of series as a 'nice to know' bit of info (last item in a file naming template so as to not mess up a series sort.
If I am interested in which author participated, I use the Tag browser/search:
eg: show me only books by Author X that were part of any series:
authors:"=X" and series:true