Impact of adding field to authors or series table?

[mikespub]

I understand that Calibre has its own access methods on top of the metadata.db sqlite database, and it has this nice concept of custom columns ... but that only seems to apply to books, not authors, series etc.

Links and notes are available by default now, but if we want to keep track of anything else related to these entities, we're kinda stuck.

So my question: if I wanted to add an "image" field to the authors and/or series table (for example) in the database for use by another program, would there be any potential issues with Calibre or some plugins breaking down the road?

Or is there some other recommended way to add a "custom field" to authors, series etc.?

I haven't been able to find any answers to that in any of the FAQs - but maybe I missed something?

Thanks

[chaley]

Changing the structure of any calibre table can, and often does, break something. A trivial example: anyone who does a "select *" will have a broken query.

You can add tables that link back to calibre ids without breaking anything. However, the linkage might break if calibre changes the id of something, which can happen. For example, merging tags will delete some ids. Changing case can change ids.

You can probably get something to work, but I suspect it will be fragile.

Some people use links in notes to open other applications where they keep their structured data. Others use structured HTML that applications can parse and grab the info they want.

[BetterRed]

I have a calibre library for Creators, which contains custom columns pertinent to Authors, Translators, Illustrators etc, e.g. date and place of birth and death, publishers, links to other Creators, etc. My Books library has the relevant "calibre://book-details/Creators/nnn" URL in the Author/Translator/... links field.

'Clicking' on an Link icon in a book's Detail panel will pop a separate Detail panel for that Author/Translator/....

I started doing this the day calibre://URLs were introduced in calibre version 5.?, prior to that I used Evernote to do something similar but that was nowhere near as effective as having a separate calibre library.

I do not have items in the Creators library for every author, only those who I regard as significant. It's also how I handle pseudonyms, e.g. Authors 'J.K. Rowling' and 'Robert Galbraith' in the Books library link to 'Joanne Rowling' in the Creators library.

BR