Solved Movie set management
#1
I recently opened a PR here https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/2492 with the aim to allow some basic manipulation of movie sets.

This thread is to continue the discussion before landing on a final solution.

Outstanding questions:
1) location of action : context menu ? additional button on video info window?
2) usability: set the movie set for each movie vs. adding/removing movies (multiple select) from a set (like we do for tags).

Regarding 2):

option a) Setting the set for each movie individually:
Pro: the philosophy is not to perform many changes here, just to correct some set links that were incorrect on themoviedb.org.
Con: have to repeat for each movie you want to include in a set

option b) Use add/remove with a multi-select GUI:
Pro: easy to perform action for many movies, at once
Con: since a movie can belong to max only one set, the risk is that unknowingly one could remove a movie from a set while adding it to another

option c) = a)+b)

My personal preference goes to option a) because you don't inadvertently change the set of a movie, plus it's only going to be used for relatively few changes, so the approach should be simple.

PS. By the way even for tagging I' really don't like the the add / remove approach: it's counterintuitive, look at how photoshop elements manages tags - you add tags to photos, not the opposite.
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#2
i'd prefer option C
The photo software i use (Adobe Lightroom) i can select multiple pictures and assign it to one tag (or anything else i want to change,
The con of B can be blocked by warning the user that the movie is already added to one set.
Options in context menu / videoinfo dialog should be limit as far as possible (see other thread http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=154474)
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#3
1) I think the options should be available both from the context menu and the video info dialog but we shouldn't just add a new option "edit/manage movie set" or "edit/manage tags" but hide it behind an "edit movie/video/item" button which either opens a "sub context menu" or some management dialog which provides access to all kinds of management functionality like changing the title, managing sets/tags/genres etc. That would help clean up the context menu a bit and also unify the functionality available in the item views and the video info dialog.

For managing sets/tags/... in the specific views a simple "Manage <foo>" entry in the context menu should be enough as there's no video info dialog for these items. Tags already have "Add <foo>" and "Remove <foo>" so those could be replaced by "Manage tag" or something like that.

2) IMO it's not an a) or b), we should provide both. We already provide b) for tags but I'm totally in favour of also providing a). Which option/way you get depends on where you are in the GUI. If you are in a movie list you get a), if you are in a sets/tags list you get b). That way you can do the management from anywhere and not just from a very specific view.
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#4
thanks for the quick replies. I'll do some more work to add the "option b" from the movie set context menu, taking your suggestions into account. I can already start with the current multi-select dialog, and then switch over to the new one (still WIP by montellese) when it's avail.

Regarding the context menu, couldn't we just start with the regular context items and then reorganize into sub-context once it's there?
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#5
Once it's there I'm pretty sure it will take another 2 stable releases until someone moves it out again and it could be kinda confusing for users if at first it works like this and then suddenly the options aren't there anymore and they have to start looking for them somewhere else.
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#6
IMO we can add it to the context menu as long as a dev promises to move all the managing related stuff out of the context menu into a management dialog (for Gotham). It's sorta unfair to bind this feature to another feature we'd like to have.
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#7
yes, I agree with da-anda, that makes sense.
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#8
* Montellese waits for someone to make that promise

What punishment do I get to execute if the promise is not fulfilled? Wink
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#9
(2013-03-26, 13:17)da-anda Wrote: IMO we can add it to the context menu as long as a dev promises to move all the managing related stuff out of the context menu into a management dialog (for Gotham). It's sorta unfair to bind this feature to another feature we'd like to have.

Problem is when will be the release of Gotham?
If we decide it will be at the end of the year i might see this happening, if it's sooner there might be too little time to get that change in and it als depends on how big a change it is code wise.
Also even if devs promise to move it out that's not a guarantee it will happen. All kind of things may come between it like RL

[/of topic]
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#10
Martijn, perhaps that question says more about our release management approach. Maybe it's time to think about the "what" rather than the "when". If we say that on the Gotham feature list we want the context menu improvements AND some set management, then I think we shouldn't release Gotham before those features are in.
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#11
* Martijn looks at the board members
I think if we know when we will release we can work towards that. If we want certain features in we can give that "priority" and react on that if delayed a bit.
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#12
code for option b) has been added to the PR. The only thing that isn't there (yet) is the check for a residual empty set when reassigning the last movie from that set to another one. That's relatively easy to do.
Just looking for additional feedback now.
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#13
There might be a problem concerning updating the information of a movie with a scraper. Let's say I scrape "Iron Man" from TMDB and it gets put into the "The Avengers Collection" but I don't like that and use the new functionality to remove the movie from that set. Later for some reason I refresh that movies information and gets added back to the "The Avengers Collection". This might even be worse if I added the movie to a custom "Iron Man Collection" set and then refresh the movie's information from TMDB and my local changes are overwritten.

This problem is not specific to movie sets, it becomes a problem as soon as we allow editing information from within XBMC so IMO it's important to discuss it and decide if/how we want to handle this.
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#14
For the refresh problem, the main issue is whether the user knows that refreshing will overwrite anything they've done manually. As long as that is clear I don't see the problem. Secondly, we need to have replace-in-place to at least restrict the amount of shuffling in the database.

As for the basic idea of editing within XBMC, I would suggest that mass-editing is best done outside XBMC (webapp or similar). Minor editing could perhaps be done inside XBMC, though even that is not particularly quick with a remote. I could see much more argument for it happening on a tablet, however. Either way I'd suggest that we ensure the functionality to do so is exposed to JSON-RPC (My guess is that most of it is already), as this stuff is much better suited to add-ons, particularly when we have a number of add-on devs that seem to be keen on working on this sort of thing (e.g. MilhouseVH).

I think we do need to make it general. At this point that generality might be just making any entry points generic (e.g. "Edit movie" rather than "Add to set" or whatever). That could then open a separate dialog (we could just use context for now) for the specifics. Later on we can then switch to a more complicated dialog later on as other things are added, or indeed, allow an add-on to fill a dialog.

For editing multiple movies at once (e.g. adding a tag to 10 movies) the interaction that feels more natural is to select the 10 movies in the main list then "edit movies". The shared information from all movies would then be available to edit, with blank fields for everything else. Setting something in a blank field would set the same information across all movies.

Cheers,
Jonathan
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#15
(2013-03-26, 14:05)Martijn Wrote: * Martijn looks at the board members
I think if we know when we will release we can work towards that. If we want certain features in we can give that "priority" and react on that if delayed a bit.

Gotham doesn't especially have a "when" for release. It's absolutely a "what." There are certain things that have to go in, and until they're in, it's not happening. And then when they are in, it's basically auto-time to start the beta cycle. Still working on the exacts of that list though.
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