Changing case on category (tag) values

[BetterRed]

This is just a minor annoyance. However to anyone who relies on modified date in some way it may be more than that.

Say I have a publisher - 'Yale Law'. When I add a new 'book' from there, I enter the value into the publisher cell on the spreadsheet. Normally I'll enter 'yal↓' and pick up 'Yale Law' from the drop down list, but when I'm on a 'roll' I'll enter 'yale law<tab>'.

Whooshka all the 'books' that were 'Yale Law' are changed to 'yale law', all their opf files are rewritten and all their modified dates are updated to 'now'.

I usually spot the 'error' when I sight check the metadata and then I change it to Yale Law and they all change back again :lol: The only impact this has on me is that 1126 opf files will be backed up when tonight's shutdown script executes

Is there anyway to stop this happening?

Another thing that causes a mass update of book metadata is if I enter a new, or change an existing, Author Link value in Manage Authors. All the opf files for the author's books are rewritten and the modified date is updated. I don't care about this instance - because it doesn't happen inadvertently, and I appreciate why it its necessary - I think.

However it would be nice to have something that prevented me from overtyping a Proper Case name with the same Lower Case name (or similar) - maybe by popping an "are you really sure you wanna do this' question. I've fallen down this rabbit hole about 6-7 times in that last couple of days.

BR

[Sabardeyn]

BR,
You haven't fallen down the rabbit hole... You're actually in the anti-rabbit hole. You've flown up, not fallen down. Mind, you've still landed with a bump and a thump.

IIRC the functionality you're encountering is a fix for situations where exact matches, with the exception of character case, are treated as different database entries by calibre. So if you type Yale Law or yale law or yAlE lAw or other variant case combinations, calibre recognizes that you're referring to the same entity. However, it does assume you're correcting the spelling of that entity and changes all related records accordingly. Otherwise you would have chosen Yale Law when it came up as an option on the drop-down list.

I've been hit with it as well, but while correcting alternate spellings or phrasing among the entries in my database. I think any repeated entity within the database may experience this issue.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Sabardeyn

BR,
You haven't fallen down the rabbit hole... You're actually in the anti-rabbit hole. You've flown up, not fallen down. Mind, you've still landed with a bump and a thump.

IIRC the functionality you're encountering is a fix for situations where exact matches, with the exception of character case, are treated as different database entries by calibre. So if you type Yale Law or yale law or yAlE lAw or other variant case combinations, calibre recognizes that you're referring to the same entity. However, it does assume you're correcting the spelling of that entity and changes all related records accordingly. Otherwise you would have chosen Yale Law when it came up as an option on the drop-down list.

I've been hit with it as well, but while correcting alternate spellings or phrasing among the entries in my database. I think any repeated entity within the database may experience this issue.

@Sabardeyn: Yes, you have described the behaviour exactly.

If I really want to correct the spelling or casing of a Publisher name (or anything similar), and have it cascade through all the books from that Publisher, then I would do it via the Publisher Category Editor, where I can edit, eyeball and commit or cancel. If its really simple then I might use the context menu Rename <value> option in the Tag (Category) browser.

However, I'd prefer that changes did not cascade through the database because of a typo in a single spreadsheet cell. Reminds me of Reinhart and Rogoff's blunder... at least my typos won't result in mass unemployment in the Euro or any other zone.

I suspect that I'm in a small minority of calibre users who types the metadata rather than downloading it, and who types it into the spreadsheet rather than the Edit Metadata dialogue boxes.

ETA: I don't really expect anything will/can be done to 'fix' this, my main purpose was to post something here to give two possible reasons why lots of opf files can get rewritten and lots of books can have their Modified Date updated.

As I said it causes me no major grief, and reminds me of why I put that 'Last Change' custom date column in my main library.

BR