"Special" smart collection possible?

[Miesmacher]

Hi,
I am using bookpedia and don't manage to make a smart collection that would be useful to me:

What I'd like to have, eg when browsing in a bookstore, is a list of all the books I rated with 5 stars. That is easy, of course. However, having a lot of books and a bad memory, I'd like to avoid buying the same book twice.

To this effect it would be helpful if that list not only listed the 5 star books but ALL books by an author which has got AT LEAST one 5 star rating for one of his books.

So something like

- find all books with 5 stars
- make a list with the authors names
- display all books by these authors


However, I don't manage to do such a list. Is it impossible or am I not good enough?

Thanks and cheers,
Thorsten

[Conor]

That one is a really tough one and is impossible. One can base smart collections on other collections, including smart collections, but they won't extrapolate from one collection and broaden the search i.e. all the books by the authors in this other smart collections.

There are a number of manual ways to get this information though. Because the way my mind works, the easiest one would be to tag all the books by an author that has at least one 5 star book. Sort your collection by the 'My rating' column and then by 'Author', this way it will be easy to see which authors fall in this category when browsing the table view. Then select all the books by one author by holding down the shift key and clicking on the first book and last book. Use the edit button to add a tag to all the books at once, something like "5 star author". Repeat with other authors.

Staying up to date is easier with the use of smart collections, for example create a smart collection "Tags contains 5 star author". Then create a smart collection "Tags does not contain 5 star author" AND (ALL match) "My rating is 5 stars" to keep track of those books that still need to be tagged (when an author appears in this smart collection all his books need to be tagged). There are other combinations of smart collections that could help you manage the way you want to browse your information.

If you don't want to use the tags, you could also use one of the custom fields as a dedicated field for this information. If you decide to use the tags use the beta version of Bookpedia where multi-edit of tags is additive and does not replace the current tags. As well as tags being included in the Spotlight index so that you can use Spotlight to search for "5 star author".

[noisyscott]

I'd like to add my thoughts about what I'd like to do with special collections. When I am browsing entries or editing the data of my libraries (both CD and DVDPedias) I am most interested in the more subtle or tangential connections between titles; genre spanning movie actors, directors, and musicians, record lables, etc. This kind of special collection would be possible if we could search for any arbitrary data (i.e. a name) that appeared in more than one field (actor, director, key-grip, etc), but without having to specify the arbitrary data (i.e. name). It's the old "Compare all entries against each other and display all entries where any field is equal to another filed with a different name". Does that make sense?

So as an example, you could have a "genre-spanners" special collection that could identify all actors or directors who have made movies in more than one genre. You could also define a special collection that could identify all actors who have moved on to being directors.

I am sure this could be done in an sql search on the raw data, the trick would be in figuring out how to present it to users who don't know or want to learn the syntax.

Anyway, thanks for listening.
Scott

[Conor]

Compare all entries against each other and display all entries where any field is equal to another filed with a different name

That is an interesting idea, but one that I think will match a lot more than you think. You would need to limit the match to certain fields, reducing it's usefulness. The ability to say "not the same" and "same" could be interesting, but then all smart collections with this rule would need at least two rules, otherwise it would match everything (not the same to what?). It would require a whole different UI to setting up smart collection to cut down on the confusion. One where it can display "[select field:Directors] are the same [select:as or and] [select field:Genres] [optional:are not the same]". I haven't even begun to think how you would translate that to SQL. Thank you for the feedback, it's definitely interesting; not something I'll be adding to the next version but something that is worth exploring.

[Miesmacher]

Thanks for answering so quickly - and sorry for my late answer, I seem to be forgetting to click on that "Notify me"-button lately...

ANyway, that's unfortunate that my "complex" search does not work, but I am happy wih the qorkaround you suggested.
Thanks a lot,
Thorsten