Merging Smart Collections

[adamhh]

I'd quite like the ability to build smart collections out of existing (smart) collections. This would be of great use when 2 smart collection respectively contain a combination of 'match all' AND 'match any'. Here's a hypothetical E.g. in DVDpedia: a third smart collection created from the combination of:

Smart Collection 1:"Cagney Gangster films" (created by Genre containing 'gangster' and starring containing 'James Cagney' - match all)
Smart Collection 2: "All time greats" (created Tags containing 'BFI top 100'; 'AFI top 100', 'Channel 4 Films to see before you die'; 'Sight and Sight top 10' - match any

I guess if this isn't possible, I'm asking if we can have the ability to use BOTH match 'any' and match 'all' within a single smart collection.

Many Thanks

[Conor]

Thanks for the feedback. You can do a smart collection based on other collections including smart collections. So create those two smart collections and then create a third smart collection that has the rules, "Movie - is in collection - Cagney Gangster films" and "Movie - is in collection - All time greats". Currently DVDpedia won't go through and update the smart collections that a smart collection might be based on. So you will have to click the first two collections to update them and then on the third collection based on the first two. If you have many of these smart collections you can put them all in a folder where clicking on the folder will update all the smart collections within.

[sjk]

So, if I understand correctly, you're saying a smart collection won't be refreshed until any other smart collections it includes are also refreshed?

[adamhh]

Cool - I'm gonna give this a whirl...

[kbarnes70]

So, if I understand correctly, you're saying a smart collection won't be refreshed until any other smart collections it includes are also refreshed?

Has to be that way doesn't it? If the first smart collection isn't updated, the movie that the second smart collection is looking for won't be there. So it's necessary to update the first smart collection first. A bit of a drag but not too bad if you put all similar smart collections into a folder and then update the lot in one pass by clicking the folder. I guess Conor will find a way to auto-update the smart collections at some point, which would be much more elegant.

Smart collections can throw up some strange behaviour. I had a problem, for example, when creating a temporary smart collection for IMDb updating. For example, I would sometimes want to take a bunch of entries and mass delete the IMDb ratings, then make a smart collection where the ratings field was empty, then run Get Advanced Info/IMDb to update these ratings. The problem was that sooner or later the program would hang as the smart collection dynamically changed by removing an entry once its rating field had been updated - it no longer then met the criteria for being in the smart collection of course. Conor fixed this problem in one of the many beta releases but it shows how these things can be tricky to implement I guess.

Kind regards

Keith

[Conor]

I originally tried to auto refresh references smart collections, but this opens the door to a possible endless recursive loop (smart collection A is based on smart collection B and smart collection B is based on smart collection A). The internal setup that keeps all these things fast makes solving this problem not so easy.