More > Media Center 12 (Development Ended)
nestable fields: wow! + tips
rjm:
I had a feeling nestable fields were something significant but have been avoiding trying them because I did not understand the concept when they were announced, and I was scared about doing some damage to my precious library and views.
I just spent 30 hours over the last 3 days experimenting with nestable fields and ended up completely reorganizing my library with them.
In a word, WOW! Let me say it again, WOW! This is THE most important new feature I have seen in 3 years. Yes, even bigger than tabs.
I encourage any of you that have not tried them yet to give them a go. You can do amazing things with nestable fields to improve the visibility of your library content, and to greatly simplify complex custom views you may have created.
Also complements to the development team on the stability of this new feature. I pushed the hell out of it for 3 days and it did not burp once. Not once. And I'm still using 12.0.404.
Here are tips on 3 cool ways to use nestable fields.
1) Simplify View Schemes (by collapsing pains)
Say you have a Genre pain for music and Topic pain for books. You can collapse these fields (and more) into one pain. First create a new library field called say Subject. Then select all of your music and fill Subject with the expression "=Genre\[Genre]". Now select all of your books and fill Subject with the expression "=Topic\[Topic]". Now delete the Genre and Topic pains from your view scheme and add a Subject pain. Voila, you're done.
2) Assign Multiple Values to the Same Group
Say you have music track that you would like to classify as both Pop and Rock. Simply set the value of Subject (or whatever you called your custom field) to "Genre\Rock;Genre\Pop". Try it, you'll be amazed!
3) Assign Different Values to Multiple Groups
Say you organize your books by Topic such as non-fiction, biography, etc. Say you also want to organize your books by something searchable in the title such as encyclopedia, for dummies, etc. Simply select all of your books and fill Subject with the expression "=Topic\[Topic]". Now do a search for one of your types, such as "encyclopedia", and fill Subject with the expression "=Type\Encyclopedia;[Subject]". This is so cool... and easy.
So what could be done to make nestable fields better? Not much, they are darn near perfect as is. I guess that's the mark of brilliant software. I do have one small suggestion. I wish there was a way to force the sort order of values. I currently prefix names with a space or period to force them to the top but it is a bit of a kludge. I was thinking maybe an escape character could be defined to force a sort order such as:
Topic\01!First Name
Topic\02!Second Name
The digits and ! escape character would not be displayed.
Thanks for an awesome feature!
DWAnderson:
Nice tips. Why not add them to the Wiki?
hit_ny:
Great for photos & docs.
I don't see much use for Audio only.
rjm:
--- Quote from: hit_ny on January 30, 2008, 12:25:56 am ---Great for photos & docs.
I don't see much use for Audio only.
--- End quote ---
You are mostly right, however I did come up with a useful application for music only. I have about 30 genres in my music collection but I am a Rock & Pop guy most of the time. So I created the following nested fields:
Genre\Favorites
Genre\Favorites\Rock
Genre\Favorites\Pop
Genre\Other\Gospel
Genre\Other\Opera
Genre\Other\Blues
Genre\Other\Cajun
Genre\Other\Bluegrass
etc.
etc.
Works great for me.
And if your audio only collection includes audiobooks with music, there are a many applications for nestable fields.
hit_ny:
I've got 75 genres, i suppose i can reduce a few in this manner but then you have to remember in which group it belongs to. For lists > 100 items it could be more useful but i still think this is limited in comparison to Matt's intro example where entire panes could be replaced. Easier to do with media with looser associations than Audio.
I suppose with most new things it will take time for it to sink in and come up with better ways to use it.
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