Bruji

Let's say you have 2 separate DVDpedia databases. One at the usual location, ~/Library/Application Support/DVDpedia, and another at ~/Documents/Alternate. You can switch between them by holding down option when starting DVDpedia.

Assume they have different data, such that their autofill information for directors, studios, etc should be different. If, for example, you Rebuild your autofill data while visiting the Alternate database, then switch to the standard one, upon viewing the autofill data you will see that it is now the rebuilt data from the Alternate database, not the data from the standard one like it should be. The same is true in reverse, if you rebuild the Standard database and then switch to the Alternate, the autofill data will be from the Standard database not the Alternate. Since DVDpedia creates a separate autofill.xml for each database, this clearly should not be: autofill data should be from the database located in same directory, not from the last rebuild you did.

When you switch databases, you must select the database file directly. This doesn't seem right, since databases are maintained in a specially designed directory hierarchy. I think you should select the top-level directory of the database "package", not the database file itself. This would also make it easier to keep autofill data associated with the correct database, since both are part of the same "package".

I think what you're suggesting is that *.dvdpedia could be a self-contained package, including autofill.xml and any other db-specific files currently shared in ~/Library/Application Support/DVDpedia. Similar to DEVONthink 2.0 *.dtBase2 and EyeTV *.eyetv packages, for example.

Hmm, I just remembered that *.dvdpedia exports are packages but not Database.dvdpedia and backup*.dvdpedia under ~/Library/Application Support/DVDpedia. Seems unusual, or at least confusing, for them both to use the same extension.

I'll shut up now and await Bruji's feedback …

It caches the autofill values for speed, the cache will now be emptied and reloaded when switching databases. You will find that change in the beta, thank you for the feedback.

We wanted to be specific about what file can be loaded to avoid confusion. Because the DVDpedia data folder is just a folder we couldn't narrow it down to just that folder in the open dialog panel, which will only take extensions as limits, therefore we use the actual .pediadata file. We have thought about making the data folder a package so that it can be clicked as one single entity. But users like browsing their data on disk, especially the covers, so we have been hesitant to wrap the entire folder in a package (not everybody knows about the "Show Package Contents" command).

There are two different extensions: ".dvdpedia" is a package with a XML collection inside and the covers, used for exporting or sending to friends. The data file is ".pediadata" and represents an SQL file with all the text data required for an entire DVDpedia database (not just a single collection).

Conor wrote:There are two different extensions

Very true; my bad. Even running "file ~/Library/Application\ Support/DVDpedia/Database.pediadata" last night didn't help me notice its extension not being .dvdpedia.

Thanks for the detailed explanation. Except for debugging and other special cases, I have no interest in browsing the data outside of DVDpedia (and maybe occasional .dcard files with Quick Look) so I wouldn't mind package encapsulation. That might make using multiple databases easier and more understandable.

But a DVDpedia database is treated differently than an exported collection (.dvdpedia package), which originally confused me since I thought the .dvdpedia package was just a smaller database. So, even if a database was a package it wouldn't be the same as a collection package. You'd still have two packages with different purposes, unlike the single .dtBase2 (DEVONthink) and .eyetv (EyeTV) packages for those apps.