Sort books by last opened?

[rockster]

Is there a way to sort the books in the library by last opened?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by rockster

Is there a way to sort the books in the library by last opened?

AFAIK Calibre only has 2 sorts (built in).
1) is the default {id},
2)you set in Preferences:Tweaks: # Specify columns to sort the booklist by on startup

eg sort_columns_at_startup = [('id', 0)]

Now, the view manager PI has views, but none just remember where you wuz when you shutdown

[eater]

Would there be a way to create a column that indicates the time the book was last opened?

Or, is there a way to cause Calibre to set the modified flag each time you open a book, so that the Last Modified column could be used to show the last-opened sort?

[theducks]

Define 'opened'
The viewer has a 'recently opened' list (right click the folder icon)
The Editor ('T') has a 'recently opened' on the FILE menu

AFAIK no such beasty exists for the MDE

[eater]

I define "opened" as: I double-clicked a title in the library and it launched a viewer window, displaying the book whose title I double-clicked. Odds are, the book was a PDF and it did not use the Calibre ebook-viewer.

[kovidgoyal]

No there isn't, but whatever viewer program you are using likely has its own list of recently opened files.

[eater]

Thanks. Most viewers, including the Calibre one, store a list of about 10 recently opened files. That's only about 1 day's worth of reading history for me.

My example use case is: back in December, I read some useful information about chile pepper breeding, in one of the many plant genetics books in my library. I don't remember which book, or which format/viewer I read it in, so I'd like to be able to list what books I opened around that time and filter them by tag.

[eater]

I see that I could use calibredb to update a custom field with the date if I have the book's catalog ID, but I'm not sure how to trigger that automatically every time I open a book... any suggestions?

[BetterRed]

Why don't you search for 'chilli pepper' with a full search tool, Windows and MacOS have them built in, afaik they can both index PDFs, there are similar tools for Linux, such as Lucene. You would search the library folder.

On Windows you could make use of the Drop Search Results to Mark the books Windows Search finds.

BR

[eater]

That search will pull up hundreds of results, since I have a lot of documents on the topic. I'm trying to narrow it down by when the document was last opened.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by eater

I see that I could use calibredb to update a custom field with the date if I have the book's catalog ID, but I'm not sure how to trigger that automatically every time I open a book... any suggestions?

Write a plugin (MyViewer) that updates a custom column with current date/time and then invokes the default viewer for the file type you wanted to view.

BR

[eater]

I wish I had time to sit down and learn how to write a plugin!

[eater]

OK, well, I ain't no kind of coder, but this paste-up job seems to work.

https://github.com/eater/datestampan...er/__init__.py

Is there a way to make it trigger when I double-click a book in the library, which is my standard way of viewing books?

Thanks!

[kovidgoyal]

Well you can monkey patch the _view_calibre_books function in iactions['View'] with a wrapper, something like this:

orig_func = iactions['View']._view_calibre_books

def myviewfunc(self, ids):
   orig_func(ids)
   # code to update database with timestamp

iactions['View']._view_calibre_books = myviewfunc

[eater]

Thanks. That makes sense and I played around with it a little but I'm not quite sure where/how to implement that part. Can you give me one more hint?