several things about external application sources

[Robby Stephenson]

Hi Jérémy,

On Friday 25 November 2005 6:25, Jérémy Frey wrote:
> I'm trying to setup an external application source which fetch data from
> an online database. It works great, I managed to put 700+ books with it.

Excellent!

> - Will you add other values than "keywords" in the adding dialog ? I had
> to create different sources : one for looking for an author, the other
> for the title, etc. It would be better to be able to select the type of
> information we want, like for amazon. Another argument to add : %2 ?

The trick is, what if thare are command-line options which need an argument? 
What if the script accepts either "-author asimov" or "-title foundation", 
but not "-author" with an empty argument? You might end up running 
"fetch.py -author asimov -title"

I could make the syntax support it, something like "fetch.py {-title %1} 
{-title %2}" where the text inside the braces is removed if %1 or %2 is 
empty. But that might get complicated, and it won't be obvious at all to 
the user. They would actually have to read the help guide...But if you or 
anyone else thinks that would work better, I can investigate it more.

> - As I said, my script gets data from internet, and because of that it's
> sometimes slow to retrieve all informations. It would help me a lot if
> there was a way to add an entry in two steps. First tellico lists books
> fetched by the script ("fetch.py -author asimov") with few informations
> (author, title, year). Then,  when the user wants to add an entry,
> tellico run the script again (for example "fetch.py -author asimov -entry
> 12") and put in the database the new result (this time the script also
> gets cover image,  publisher, comments, etc.).

That's probably a good idea. The IMDb searcher does something similar. Let 
me think on it a bit more, particularly what the GUI changes would be.

> - Last but not least (in fact it's first on my wanted list) : update
> infos. Looking a little at the source code, I understood that you haven't
> yet implemented the update event for an external application. I haven't
> tested this new feature with other sources and I don't know how it
> actually works.  Send a command like "fetch.py -update [name of a field]"
> would be perfect : I put a link to the page of the database, like the
> amazon link. And like amazon, the link contains a unique ID.

Another good idea, and probably straight-forward enough. The update entry 
functionality is still a bit rough around the edges, but I'll keep your 
suggestion in mind and try to get it in there soon.

> Err...I think I finished. Except these details, tellico is now the
> software I've always dreamed to have in order to manage my books. Great
> job ! :-)

Thanks for your feedback!
Robby