I would like to propose a feature request for adaptive depth in views. What do I mean with that? I have following problem:
My Audiobooks are currently categorized like this:
Genre --> Series --> Album
E.g.
Fantasy --> Lord of the Rings --> 1 - The Fellowship of the Ring
Fantasy --> Lord of the Rings --> 2 - The Two Towers
...
However, in some cases this kind of categorization is suboptimal and I would need a categorization scheme like this:
Genre --> Universe --> Series --> Album
(Universe is my term for franchise)
E.g.
Sci-Fi --> Star Wars --> The Old Republic --> 1 - Fatal Alliance
Sci-Fi --> Star Wars --> The Old Republic --> 2 - Deceived
...
Sci-Fi --> Star Wars --> Thrawn Trilogy --> 1 - Heir to the Empire
Sci-Fi --> Star Wars --> Thrawn Trilogy --> 2 - Dark Force Rising
...
Well currently you have three options:
- Make two views
- Use the second scheme with the universe category in which case you have to do an empty descend step for all audiobooks without universe
- Flatten all the audiobooks with a universe into a three level tree (Universe becomes Series and Album becomes the concatenation of Series and Album)
The last options is what I currently use, since I think it is the best option. However, since these universes tend to get bigger and bigger as time moves on and as I complete my collection, this makes more and more problems. E.g. the Perry Rhodan universe has 1000+ audiobooks. If i owned them all, the according view would have 1000+ entries.
This is also not the only place where I have this problem. E.g. in movies I have a similar problem.
Many movies are standalone and do not belong to a series or even a universe. Some are part of a series. Some are part of a series and a universe. And some are standalones in a universe.
E.g
Standalone: Inception
Series: Pirates of The Caribbean --> 1,2, ...
Universe + Series: Marvel --> X-Men --> 1,2, ...
Universe + Standalone: Marvel --> Venom
A standalone movie only needs a view with depth 1, while a movie that is part of a universe and a series needs three levels of depth.
The fix this problem I would like the views to behave adaptive depending on if a tag is empty or not. When adding a category in a view there should be a checkbox "Skip if empty", which does exactly what it says.
E.g. lets say we have the view
[Universe] --> [Series] --> Movie (where the square brackets indicate optional (=skipped) categories)
This view would display all universes + all series without universes + all movies without series and without universes in the top level.
It would look like this:
- Inception
- Pirates of the Caribbean
- Marvel
The first entry would directly start the movie ("" --> "" --> Inception). The second entry would show the series subview ("" --> "Pirates of the Caribbean). The last entry
would show the universe subview (Marvel).
From the point of view of a user that would make MC not more complex (only one additional checkbox in a rarely visited submenu), but much more versatile and also more natural to use.