Advanced Library Filtering

(2012-08-21 15:50)MassIV Wrote:  Great project! Want suggestions, ok here goes.
A suggestion would be a filter by source and maybe an additional folder there-in. Getting that perfect balance between folder and library organisation benefits.

(2012-08-21 16:47)Montellese Wrote:  Can you be more specific? I have one source for movies, one for tvshows and so on and I never use files view so I'll need more details to be able to imagine what you would like to achieve.

I have a seedbox as (https webdav) source. I have a NAS on the LAN as SMB. And a HDD in the drive that runs XBMC. I'll take the NAS as example, it belongs to the "building". The file structure looks like this:

jordi/media/movies/horror/whishmaster/whishmaster.(1997).avi
sander/film/disney/disney.shorts/mickey/106.steamboat.willy.avi
sander/film/disney/classics/peter.pan/peter.pan.avi
junk/junk.i.dont.want.indexed/junk.avi
rasmus/movies/dvd/green.lantern/video_ts/
rasmus/things.that.should.never.see.the.light.of.day/ever/

Can't add the whole NAS as source because of junk. And the only way to add Sander's Disney classics to the movies library, is to add the classics folder as source. Then the seedbox (http server) that has anime movies ect, that need other scrapers thus set up as separate sources.

That being said, the path contains: "sander/" filter works good enough. Specially combined with genre and name. But it will also bring up stuff from his folder on the seedbox. And i haven't memorized everyone's folder structure. But ok, just forget about the filter by sources idea, it's too specific to my situation i guess.

(2012-08-21 15:50)MassIV Wrote:  Using the custom nodes.

(2012-08-21 16:47)Montellese Wrote:  Details?

Yeah i was not sure what you meant by Foo Bar in the screenshot with Browse for Genre. But it would be great if the custom nodes would show there.

(2012-08-21 15:50)MassIV Wrote:  Not using a dialog in the middle of the screen. I believe it would work more intuitive if a user can see the results of the actions they do in the filters. Ie Google instant. Where results are coming up in a frame next to the filters.

(2012-08-21 16:47)Montellese Wrote:  I completely agree. But my design/layout skills are almost 0 and my knowledge of XBMC's GUI system are very limited as well which is why my "prototype" is a simple dialog. Ideally the filters would be directly integrated into the library view to be able to still see the list of media items. But the biggest problem will be that there are soo many different types of views.

No but that's fine. The View Options panel is also just a simple dialog. Would not be more work then changing some coordinates on the buttons and changing the background image. Save that for later. But keep it in your head if you are making dialogs within your dialog so you can dialog while you dialog, and still want to see the results changing. Once you know what you want, i can probably show you a clean working example. Or whatever falls within GSoC.

(2012-08-21 15:50)MassIV Wrote:  Last suggestion: Filtering is not (unlike view options), setting how your library should look the whole time. Filtering, as i understand it, is on the fly smart playlists (correct me if i'm wrong). So Filtering in view options will conflict with kiosk mode (you would have to go turn it off every time).

Kiosk mode is, in my opinion is a patch to the wrong implementation of view options in the first place. Kiosk is (among other) used to keep view options from accidentally showing up on an unintended <onup> or <onleft>. Which would in my eyes would be better solved by opening view options with an actual button.

(2012-08-21 16:47)Montellese Wrote:  I never used kiosk mode so far so I don't even know what it does but if it completely hides the sidebar in library views that would also mean no access to the filtering options.

Yes it hides the sidebar completely. And quite a lot of people use it i think.

(2012-08-21 15:50)MassIV Wrote:  Now that you know where i'm coming from i'll make my point: Maybe instead of just adding this to view options. This should be a makeover of view options and the way it is implemented. Or leaving view options and making a Filter/Sort button. I'll give it some more thought.

(2012-08-21 16:47)Montellese Wrote:  Maybe an independent sidebar which is dedicated to filtering would be the best approach. But most views already use every arrow key available (2 for navigation, one to get to the view options and one to get to the scrollbar) so there will be a problem of how to show it. Just assigning it another button is not very intuitive in my opinion.

I don't have the answer either. Just putting it out there. And i'll give it some more thought.

(2012-08-21 16:47)Montellese Wrote:  

(2012-08-21 15:50)MassIV Wrote:  Not using a dialog in the middle of the screen. I believe it would work more intuitive if a user can see the results of the actions they do in the filters. Ie Google instant. Where results are coming up in a frame next to the filters.

I completely agree. But my design/layout skills are almost 0 and my knowledge of XBMC's GUI system are very limited as well which is why my "prototype" is a simple dialog. Ideally the filters would be directly integrated into the library view to be able to still see the list of media items. But the biggest problem will be that there are soo many different types of views.

I think some of the other XBMC developers should be jumping in at this point, since it's obvious you have very good intentions.

It has been decided in the team that we first merge in all the functionality and the prototype dialog and then do the improved integration from there the argument being that even with this non-optimal dialog the functionality provided is still better than anything that is available in XBMC right now. Furthermore it will help improve the functionality of the filter because more users will use it and therefore report back.

Well I'm just happy the year filter idea I proposed is similar to what you guys came up with on your own, very happy.

(2012-07-04 09:33)Montellese Wrote:  It's about advanced filtering options in the library views (see http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=127885). While this is primarily focused on filtering in the GUI I hope that I can also introduce a similar functionality (probably with even more possibilities) to JSON-RPC.

Thank you for working on this! I have an old and clunky script that would search the local xbmc db (with py and sql) then write out smart playlists to the local system based on IMDB watchlists and wikipedia entries. Now we have tags I want to:
* take these imdb watchlists and map them to a desired xbmc tag, such that a GUI user can type in an IMDB url, and enter the tag they want it mapped to
* write tags to the xbmc db via json (making sure to gather the existing ones before re-writing)
* then the user can make their own smart playlist based on their shiny new dynamic tags

Having never used json i've run into quite a few barriers - none of them insurmountable thus far. I found this project because I don't fancy dumping out the entire db every single time the script runs, nor am I fond of my old sqlconnect commands. While they do offer me speed and specific filtering, it's a pain to watch out for all the different OS environments, and completely breaks if a user has their own mysql db (which they often do if they want functionality like this).

If I'm reading the introspect output of VideoLibrary.GetMovies right it looks as though I still can't use "imdbnumber" as a filter, and thus must dump the entire thing out to a hefty array.

Sorry for the blather, here's my question:
Have I understood the json filter limitations properly, such that I may not return details for a single movie given its imdbnumber?

If so, and if your project is intended to improve this situation, then thank you very much in advance.

The IMDB number is currently not available as a smartplaylist filter. One of the reasons is that it's not guaranteed to be an IMDB number, it could also be a TMDB ID depending on the scraper that is being used. Furthermore it's not really a value which a user would type into a smartplaylist rule by hand.

OK no worries - I can just dump it out to a big array via json each time. Better than sql connect.