Grouping by "recents" date

[mgaillard]

Hi, everybody,

I was wandering if anybody would be interest by a "recents" group.
I usualy work this around by setting the sort of "no grouping" on date added to CC. Anyway I long for a customizable "recents" book group with the ability (in the settings) of retaining books either from last week, last month, last three monthes... or last added.

I think this could quite easily been implemented, as CC keeps memory of date added. But it is not necessarely worth the work for it if I am the only one interested.

Maxime

[kaufman]

Originally Posted by mgaillard

I usualy work this around by setting the sort of "no grouping" on date added to CC.

This is what I do as well

Originally Posted by mgaillard

Anyway I long for a customizable "recents" book group with the ability (in the settings) of retaining books either from last week, last month, last three monthes... or last added.

I'm not sure I understand what the value of this is. How is this different than what you are doing now, but just limiting how far back you look in the list?

[mgaillard]

Originally Posted by kaufman

This is what I do as well

I'm not sure I understand what the value of this is. How is this different than what you are doing now, but just limiting how far back you look in the list?

Well, I think it should load faster than the whole list ( I have thousands of books on a SD card) and free the no grouping for an other sort. Actualy it is a very common type of grouping in library apps, so it could be added to CC just to get the whole thing.

But I agree with you as I say I'm not sure it is worth the work.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by mgaillard

I was wandering if anybody would be interest by a "recents" group.
I usualy work this around by setting the sort of "no grouping" on date added to CC. Anyway I long for a customizable "recents" book group with the ability (in the settings) of retaining books either from last week, last month, last three monthes... or last added.

One of my difficulties with this is the definition of "recent". It could be date added (CC), date read (CC), date accessed (CC), date updated (CC), date (calibre), or some custom column. Adding any one of them would more-or-less require adding all of them.

CC can already group on custom column dates, pubdate, and date (calibre). The groups are by month (ascending) with the exception of pubdate, which is by year. It is possible (without outrageous amounts of work) to add the ability to group on the CC dates in the same fashion. This would be consistent with what is already there (in CC) and would not define in advance what "recent" means.

The above leaves the question: does grouping by month solve the problem?

[mgaillard]

Originally Posted by chaley

The above leaves the question: does grouping by month solve the problem?

I didn't clearly understood what grouping by date meant (each file having a different time stamp) so I never tried.
I have just selected this option, but database refreshing may take a very long time, so I shall be back tomorow.
Grouping by month added in CC would be perfect, provided that the more recents are at the top.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by mgaillard

Grouping by month added in CC would be perfect, provided that the more recents are at the top.

And this is the problem. Currently they are sorted "ascending" which means that the most recent are at the bottom. I am willing to change that, but it will take thought to make work.

Why am I willing to change it? During my testing I discovered that the computation of the year-month doesn't work correctly for timezones other that GMT. Given that no one has reported this problem I think that the number of users of date-type grouping is very small. That said, changing current behavior is always very dangerous.

Another possibility is to make newly-added dates sort "descending", something that would not change current behavior but that would be very strange because two dates (e.g., pubdate and cc-date-added) would sort differently.

Sometimes I think I should retire for-real and forget about all this stuff.

[mgaillard]

Hi Chaley,

CC has just ended upgrading it's database.
Grouping by date is very near from what I wanted (I usualy add new books once a month), so I set this group as default when starting CC. - Alas, last month is at the end. ( but this can wait 'till you decide (or not) to change the behaviour).
I think that the grouping by date should be more documented in the settings of Group/sort on custom columns : the fact that books are actualy grouped by month is not obvious.

[chaley]

Changes that will go to beta tomorrow:

1) I added cc_date_accessed, cc_date_updated, cc_date_read, and cc_date_added to the list of fields that can be added to the grouping drawer.

2) I added a setting to control individually how groups are sorted in the grouping drawer, ascending or descending. This controls both the first letter display and the items display. It isn't limited to dates. I don't see why someone would want to sort tags descending, but who knows?

[mgaillard]

That sounds fine ! - at least for the date added to CC
For the tags...anyone fond of Zoology in there ?

I shall try it tomorrow .

Thanks much.