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[hit_ny]

Love them or hate them, they get the job done.

..so was wondering what's in store for this version.

[EpF]

Love them or hate them, they get the job done.

? Why would you hate them? Love them or ignore them! 

Any added functionality to expressions would be very welcome.

[KingSparta]

Why would you hate them?

Because It Maybe Too Complex For A User And They May Just Give Up.

I Have Never Attempted To Create Anything But Minor Ones Compared To Some I Have Seen That Are So Complex You Would Need To Take A 4 Year Collage Course On Building Expressions For Media Center.

An Expression Wizard Would Help

[hit_ny]

The hardest part for me was getting the syntax right, but that was sorted here

Since MC gives no indication at all wheter a comma is missing or a bracket is in the wrong place or even a mispelled [Field].

EpF's macro can handle most of these, maybe this will get looked at in the next version but for now new functions would defnitely be welcome.

[marko]

expressions open up amazing possibilities. for now, MC is exclusively managing my images, and without the ability to use expressions in thumbnail text, this would probably not be the case.

amongst other things, I would like to see the new expression editor available from every location that accepts expressions.

[brainsoup]

I would really like to see expressions that can perform calculations between two fields (numerical)

e.g. sum(fieldA,fieldB), difference(fieldA,fieldB) etc...

That would make MC expressions very powerful...

I was also thinking along the possibility of summing over another variable

e.g. Total(Number Plays,Artist) would obtain the total number of plays for that artist or Total (Rating, Album) would give the total rating for that album (i.e 45 for 9 tracks at 5), or even Total(1,Name) would sum up the number of tracks with the same name as that track...

You could then use this to produce some pretty nice fields that could be used very well in Smartlists and such...

Just a thought

[hit_ny]

Numerical expressions are exactly what i was looking for, amongst others a way to average ratings so i don't have to do this manually. I'm not bothered too much with speed as these can be calculated and cached in another field  for faster display in view schemes.

When thinking about how to do this, how about "group by", since expressions can only carry out operations on one item at at time and are not able to take into account values from other items.

So group by [Field] could give a way to select a [Field] that was common between items and then carry out a calculation.

This would work with associative math, like addition or multiplication where the order that the items are presented in, does not affect the result.

(5+2)+1 = 5+(2+1) or  5 x ( 2 x 3 ) = (5 x 2 ) x 3

It gets trickier with non-asociative math like subtraction & division where the order of items matters.

(5 - 2) - 3 does not equal (5 - 3) - 2

maybe that could be solved using parenthesis, to indicate order of calculation.

[brainsoup]

I think with just the functions provided it would be pretty easy to create an average...

eg average rating for an album

divide(Total(Rating,Album),Total(1,Album))

I agree with using a field to store this data. This is what I initially thought calculated fields were but alas they are not... such a shame as there are so many things that I would like to do with these things and with just five functions (The 4 op's and a Total function) all of them would be possible. Maybe if using this for expressions would be too time consuming then maybe limiting it to calculated fields.

Lets keep our fingers crossed...