Bookpedia 5.0 author sorting issue

[malke]

I upgraded from the last 4.6* version to 5.0 today and now all my authors are sorted first name, last name instead of the way I had them: last name, first name. Why and how do I fix this? I have nearly 2,000 books and I don't want to fix this manually! Thanks for the help.

[Nora]

With version 5 the author field has become a multi-value field so that more than one entry can be honored in the statistics, etc. Commas act as separators for the blue bubbles, i.e. they signal the program that the next person is listed.

If you selected the wrong author display during the update, you can re-do it by quitting Bookpedia and deleting the Database.bookpd file. Then restart Bookpedia and the program will update the old database file (Database.pediadata) once more, asking you to select the correct author display again.

However regardless of the way your authors are listed you can always sort the Author column by last name first. Just hold down the Option key and click on the column header to sort the column again.

[jotie]

I unfortunately have the same trouble. I already deleted the database.bookpd file and restarted the program. When selecting 'no' when the program tried to rebuild the database, this resulted in the 'old list order' where last and first name are comma seperated. However, when I try to add a title and type in the author's name in the 'classical' order, this resulted in two separated names. So typing in 'Celan, Paul' resulted in 'Celan' & 'Paul'. That's not what I want. I want an author field where I can define myself how last and first names should be treated. So, is there any possibility to 'tell' the program to deny the space as a 'meaningful' character and the comma as a separator (and probably switching for a semicolon in stead) in the author field?

[sjk]

This article also explains the new behavior that Nora mentioned:

Bruji News » Blog Archive » Are There Any Commas Out There?

Using only DVDpedia, I haven't noticed any drastic side effects of this since upgrading but might not fully understand it yet. One advantage is multi-valued Genre fields that used to be treated like a single comma separated value are now split into individual values. For example, "Comedy, Drama, Romance" becomes "Comedy" "Drama" "Romance". However, it might be a bug that Preferences > Autofill > Genre still displays it as the former until a Rebuild is done that splits it into separate values. It's similar with some of the other fields, too.

[nachtgedanken]

I have carefully redone every entry I did in the last 9 month to Lastname, firstname because I need this for the export funktion. As long as there is no decent bookpedia iPhone app I'm restricted to a csv-format to have a list of my books offline(!) when not at home. Although I have chosen the right sort option, now everything is switched to Firstname Lastname with no possibility to change this for the export. I'm really fuming here. Even if I switch to another bookprogramm, my database is ruined. I'm speaking of 3500+ books here.

[Nora]

We're looking into including an option for exports to have the authors appear Lastname, Firstname. (The program already does this for the MLA style bibliography.) I assume you know about the 'sort by last name' option in the author column that lets you sort the column last name even though the authors are displayed Firstname Lastname? If not, you can do this by holding down the Option key and then re-sorting the column.

Of course you're also welcome to return to version 4 if you'd rather do that. You can download the old version here: http://www.bruji.com/bookpedia/bookpedia4.6.8.dmg
Make sure after you downgrade to version 4.6.8 you delete the data file for version 5 (Database.bookpd) so that if you ever do decide to update, the program will be forced to do this from your 4.6.8 file. You will find the file in the Bookpedia data folder, located in your Home folder under ~/Library/Application Support/Bookpedia
If you're on Lion, it hides the Library folder by default so to go to your Bookpedia data folder you have to use the Finder's 'Go' menu, select 'Go to Folder' and copy paste ~/Library/Application Support/Bookpedia into the window that appears.

[Raskolnikov]

Solved by holding Option Key