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[wburkett]

This is weird.  I created a field called "MyRating" which is a string.  Even though it is a string, I put in numeric integer values to rate songs.  For songs I haven't rated, I use a value "-1".  When I create a smartlist for unrated songs where "MyRating" "is" "-1", it doesn't work - I get everything.  If I change it to "4" or "5", etc, it works properly, but "-1" doesn't.  Does the rules engine interpret this as "True" or something rather than the character string "-1"?

EDIT: so I solved the problem by changing the datatype from string to integer.  But I still think it's odd that the smartplaylist rule didn't match the string "-1" correctly.

[blgentry]

Confirmed.  I tried every quoting method I could think of to match on "-1" in a string field and it didn't work.  It matched on all files instead.

Then I changed the field type to integer.  Bam.  Problem solved; it matches correctly.

Why not make it an integer or decimal field?  It's a weird bug for sure, but this solution seems to fit the needs of rating media files numerically.

Brian.

[mark_h]

Did you try escaping the - in the expression, eg

[MyRating]=[/-1]

[blgentry]

^ Yes.  I tried MANY different expressions.  In fact, I think it's the escaping that's the problem.  MC puts it in automatically.  If you remove it (in import/export), MC puts it back.

Try it for yourself.

Brian.

[Matt]

I think this will be fixed in the next build (21.0.34 or later).

The string -1 triggered a range evaluation because the string was actually /-1 when we looked at it so the dash was at the second spot.  But that's just silly, so I made a fix.

[wburkett]

Why not make it an integer or decimal field?  It's a weird bug for sure, but this solution seems to fit the needs of rating media files numerically.

I did - I left it as an integer after discovering that it worked as expected.

Thanks, all, for checking into it.  I'm glad my unknowing newbie ways uncovered something that needed fixing.  :-)

Bill