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[marko]

The option itself is brilliant and has pretty much eliminated all of my slowdown issues in Theater View where my photos make heavy use of expressions for things like calendars, locations, occassions and population, and of course, the ages of people in photos at the time they were taken.

Static data like this only needs to be calculated once.

Thing is, as time moves on and new files are added, it gets tough tracking files that have data replacing expressions, or more explicitly, those that don't.

I currently have a view that lists all media in details view, with a column for every field with that option set.

The first pane here is "Date Tagged". The second pane is a search list containing filters along the lines of "Has Age", "Has Location" and so on and the name of this pane contains the date I last updated the fields, replacing the expression results with the results themselves. I use that date to filter "Date Tagged" from then to now and update the fields for these new files, finally, renaming the search list pane with the current date so that I know where I got up to when I revisit in a month or two.

This is tiresome and rather imprecise. There has to be a better way, surely, but I cannot think of one, nor can I think of the best way that MC might be able to help. My first thought was that if data had replaced the expression, maybe we could switch on an "Identify" flag that would change the colour of that data in a list. While that would help visually, it wouldn't help with filtering, would it?

Can anyone else think of a streamlined way to stay on top of this?

[zybex]

I think [field, 0] could be made to always return the calculated value (ie, ignoring any override value).
The default [field] or [field,1] would keep the current behavior, ie, returning either the calculated value or an override if it was set.

Then you'd just need to compare [field] to [field, 0] to know if the current override is different from the base expression. You could have a Smartlist showing files where this happens.

[marko]

Thanks zybex, issue with that is, the override value = the calculated value. The payback here is that Theater view no longer takes around five or six seconds to respond to navigational presses on the remote control.

[zybex]

Then a new function isOverridden(fieldName) or isDefault(fieldName) ?

[marko]

That would be excellent. It would make management orders of magnitude easier. @Matt, could that be a possibility?

[zybex]

Or a mode 2 in Field() that returns the current override value, if any (equivalent to [fieldName, 2].
mode 0 - expression/raw value
mode 1 - override or expression value (first not empty)
mode 2 - override value

[marko]

I prefer IsOverridden() as it makes more immediate sense to me. Depending on what I want to do, I can list 1 or 0 results to get at exactly the files needed.

[Matt]

I prefer IsOverridden() as it makes more immediate sense to me. Depending on what I want to do, I can list 1 or 0 results to get at exactly the files needed.

We can add that expression.  Thanks for the suggestion.

[marko]

Matt, zybex, Thank you both. Looking forward to this...

[marko]

This has worked very well indeed.
I now have a search list entry for each field, coupled with a new "Overridden Data" group in the tag window. So much had been missed using the kludge outlined in the first post, all of which has now been tidied up, with confidence.

Wiki pages are now updated... https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Test_and_Comparison_Functions#IsOverridden

Once again, thank you.

[JimH]

Thanks for your help with the wiki.