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[HPBEME]

The image below shows how I have my “info” screen laid out in Theater View's "Playing Now".  I have had it like this for years (since MC 15 at least).  After installing MC-20 the behavior has changed as follows:

•   When I click on bio, it displays a list view of every picture (yes… pictures) in my library
•   When I click on lyrics, it displays a list view of every audio track in my library (16000+)
•   When I click on album review, it displays all the album tracks associated with track currently being played

In all cases, the expected/past behavior (when clicking on these values) is the value expands to full screen to display the entire bio, lyrics, and album review.  Any chance you guys will remedy this in the (very) near future?

20mb image hosting

[kensn]

20.0.11 (8/27/2014)

13. NEW: Enter on any field in Theater View will show files that match that search (instead of toggling the expanded state).

I believe that this is the reason for your broken views. I am not a big fan of this either as it has broken the intended functionality of the view.

I would like to see it just perform a search on certain criteria such as Artist, Actor or Director. At least have to use another keystroke to invoke the search instead of the default enter.

Ken

[HPBEME]

I think you have hit the nail on the head that that is the culprit... thanks so much for finding the info.

If this is indeed the intended behavior (now), how is one supposed to display the complete bio, lyrics, etc in Theater View?  I mean, that is how large value string field’s work, right... you click on it and it expands... how else are they to be viewed?

I have spent more time than I care to admit trolling the depths of the internet and manually adding biographies, lyrics, and album reviews with the express purpose of displaying them Theater view, and this completely cripples those efforts.  Hopefully this is just an oversight and now that it has been pointed out it will be corrected… right (he asks hopefully)?

[marko]

you select the field and press right to expand it.

This keeps catching me out too, but for now, I put it down to 'old habits die hard' and decided to try retraining the automatic urge to press enter to expand to 'press right to expand' instead.

[HPBEME]

Ahh… now I see why I did NOT stumble onto the solution.  I rarely use a remote.  Is there a way to expand the fields with a mouse (like before)?  I have tried all the usual suspects…  Shift/Alt/Ctrl + L/R (each key combo one at a time).  Even if one of those happened to work, that is still no bueno IMO.  So if this is the intended behavior, what is the thinking behind showing a list view of ALL my pictures when I select Artist Bio???  Bizarre choice if you ask me and it really makes Theater View useless to me now.  I hope this behavior can be made user selectable in a near-term update.

And for those wondering why I use a mouse instead of a remote… well…  I work from home and have two 55” TV’s side by side that I use as monitors.  I also have a Ceton 4X Tuner card, so my TV runs thru my computer as well.  While ensconced in my insanely large recliner, I do CAD design on one, and use MC on the other, so dropping the mouse to pick up a remote is very inconvenient. 

Yep… I am that lazy.

[gappie]

i actually like the new feature but indeed not on every field. what i do is for the fields i dont want it, i change the field into a expression.. so when i dont want the description field to bring me to some other list i just put expression instead using [description]. same for actors but since it is a list, i use

Code: [Select]

[actors]&datatype=[list].. the enter key (or mouse) wont bring you further, still need the arrow key (from remote or keyboard), but you wont be brought to an other screen.

 
gab

EDIT: i should say where i use that.   its in options>theater View>customize file info panel  

[6233638]

This should not be happening with fields like Description, only fields which can contain list data. (E.g. Artist, Director, Keywords)
I don't know why these views are fixed to four-line displays either. They should use the full available vertical space.

[Matt]

Next build:
Changed: When a field has a newline in it, enter on it in Theater View will expand it instead of doing a search on it.

[HPBEME]

Excellent!!!  Me and my (squeaky) mouse thank-you.

[glynor]

Perfect, Matt. I'd hit this too, knew why, but didn't have that elegant solution in mind.

[kensn]

Elegant indeed...

[glynor]

By the way, while we're on the subject...  The new feature that caused this is awesome, but it doesn't solve my main desired use-case: List-Type Fields.

You can't select individual List "entries" and search on them (only the whole string), making it useless for Actors and often Directors.

[kensn]

Exactly..  I envisioned the search working on a single Actor, Director, Genre or Artist.

If you move into the Actors field, pressed enter to expand the field, then used of the up down arrows to highlight an Actor, then enter on the Actor would search for that Actor.

If enter was pressed to expand the field a back could be used to get out without a search, or if no up and down arrow was used the enter could back you out.

Just my thoughts.

Ken

[HPBEME]

I updated to the latest stable build 20.0.22, and the problem still persists, but a little differently.  The behavior is now as follows:

•   click on bio:  nothing happens
•   click on lyrics:  works! (expands full screen and allows scrolling of all lyric text)
•   click on album review:  switches to show all the album tracks associated with the song currently being played (same as before)

The behavior is the same for both a mouse and remote control.  Maybe I am jumping the gun here…  Is the solution still in the works?
If so, sorry for prematurely pointing out the problem still exists.

[marko]

So... I just had my first look at this with audio files to see what I see, and the fix is there, and working as advertised. Unfortunately, this may not be enough.

• When I click on Bios to expand artist biography, it expands as expected. I wonder if yours didn't expand because it all fitted in the available space already?
• When I click on Review, it doesn't expand, as you found, it searched instead. Why is that?

The answer is in the fix...

Next build:
Changed: When a field has a newline in it, enter on it in Theater View will expand it instead of doing a search on it.

To be certain, I dropped to standard view and copied the entire contents of the Review field to the clipboard and pasted into notepad. Sure enough, there's no 'newline' there. It all pastes in as a single line. The tag window wraps the text in the editor, and wraps it for display in theater view. Where to go from there?

I don't know how to search for newlines, if someone can help with that, we could return all the files that dont' have one where we need them, and batch edit the lot with something like =[Review][newline] and we would be sorted.

alt+013 is, I think, the code for newline. Certainly, if I type that in notepad, it moves the cursor to a new line. MC won't accept that in a search though...

[HPBEME]

Marko, that was my concern when I first read the proposed fix, that is, "new line" = "hard return".   I did not actually modify a bio or album review to check if that had an effect, but given your slightly better results, I just now added a hard line after a few words in the fist line in the bio... no difference for me.  The behavior is exactly the same as I described in my post prior to yours.  Regarding your question:

When I click on Bios to expand artist biography, it expands as expected. I wonder if yours didn't expand because it all fitted in the available space already?

The Biographies I am using to check behavior require substantially more space than the default allotment of 4 lines (or the 8 lines shown when hovering the cursor over the field), so that is not the problem.

I has been a few years (errr... decades really) since I have done any type of coding (Pascal and FORTRAN back in college), so I apologize in advance for the likely stupidity of my following suggestions.
Can the search/expand behavior simply be based on whether "large value" string type is true/false?  Or...   if characters > 140, expand field full screen, else perform search.

Alright then, I'll stop embarrassing myself now by pretending I know what I am talking about.  I desperately hope this can be resolved.

[marko]

Hmm,

The Biographies I am using to check the behavior with require substantially more space than the default allotment of 4 lines (or the 8 lines shown when hovering the cursor over the field), so that is not the problem.

You know what, even as I typed that, I knew it was stupid, just couldn't think of anything else at the time!

So, I read a post from gappie this week, sorry, can't find the link, but it was definitely gappie (how ya doing gapster, long time, no speak) where he suggested that using an expression instead of the field circumvented this search on enter thing... so I tested that just now, and...

It does indeed stop the search, but, it also doesn't expand when clicked on. It does expand if I arrow right. Are you using an expression for you biographies?

Seems that expressions would be the ideal solution, if they could be made to expand.
Or maybe that's a bug, and expression based output should be searched too. I don't know. Matt?

The expression thing... I kind of took it for granted you would know, but just in case, you would go to the 'edit file info panel' in theater view options, select the field, say Review, and then in the options on the right, change it from field to expression, and for 'value', simply enter =[Review]

-marko

[glynor]

I think there's a simpler solution than all of that.

If a value:

* Contains newlines
* Is truncated (requires expansion to see the full text)

Then Enter expands the text.  A second enter does the search I guess (though this would likely be rarely used).

I think, however, the biggest problem is List-Type fields, as I mentioned above, and I think it is related.  List type fields need to also always Expand, but in the expansion, you need to be able to select the individual elements and Enter on them to do a search for just that item.

Do that, and I think it is fixed.

[HPBEME]

After re-reading your post(s) Marko, I tried a couple things again.  The reason my biography did not expand was because I had it set-up (unintentionally) as an expression and not a field, which as you pointed out, expressions do not expand.  With this updated, my bio and lyrics expand as before via a mouse click... excellent!

Further experimentation revealed album reviews expand as well, but since the vast majority of album reviews consist of a single word-wrapped paragraph, I will need to add a hard return at the end of each review for those to work.  This is essentially what you suggested a few posts back, so thanks for your insight! Though not ideal, it is worth the few hours it will take me to manually update those fields for them to expand again.

And finally...

The expression thing... I kind of took it for granted you would know

I am familiar with expressions, though I have never really done anything fancy with them.  I have however, bent their intended purpose to my will to create the layout shown in the picture in my original post.  By using expressions for Artist, Track, and Album (Year), I was able to indent those Titles and add quotes around the "song title", which IMHO, makes for a very clean and useful info screen.

[Hendrik]

This thread is somewhat old, but since it applies to it, in the next build:

8. Changed: Pressing Enter on a field in Theater View File Info will expand it when its cut-off, independent of it containing newlines.
9. Changed: Pressing Enter on an expanded Theater View File Info field will search for files that match this field.

Note that one consequence of the first change is that if a field doesn't actually need expansion, it will not expand, but go straight to the search (as sometimes selecting the field is enough to show all content, since selection expands its size slightly already)
Please report any misbehavior from this change.

Searching over individual elements in list-type fields is not possible (yet?), and would probably require quite a bit re-working, as the selection is just not possible right now.

[glynor]

Thanks, Hendrik.  That solves the annoyance!

The ability to search on List-Types would be really nice though. 

[HTPC4ME]

The ability to search on List-Types would be really nice though.  Wink

+1 Pretty Please.