Auto-import files

[odedia]

Hi,

I am quite impressed by Bookpedia. It looks great.

My needs are perhaps a bit rare, but I'm sure there are others like me:

I have A LOT of books in digital format. about 5,000 books to be exact. These are either in CHM or PDF format.

What I am lacking is the ability to simply drag all 5,000 files (or choose a folder for import, if that helps), and have Bookpedia open a dialog box, asking me "in what pattern are these files saved?"

I make it a habbit to name my files according to a very specific format. So in my case, it is always

<year>_<publisher>_<title>.

for example:

2004_Cocoa Programming_Sams

If I could just give bookpedia my own custom format in the form of some regular expression, it would be perfect. Ofcourse, what I would expect the import to do is to automatically update the info for these books, and AUTOMATICALLY link each file to the corresponding data in the database. If I had to do this manually for 5,000 titles, it will be horrible.

Thanks again.

P.S. One other thing: I am noticing that if I have some info in a field that I wrote myself (the title, for example), auto-update from amazon will not overwrite that field. Is there a way to tell bookpedia "always overwrite all fields with data from Amazon?"

[Conor]

Thanks for the feedback, we definitely want to get PDF importing working. So that you can drag some PDFs over and Bookpedia would import them as separate entries linked to each file. However we would probably take the information from the PDF file as most files have title, author and year information imbedded in them. It might seem you are a programmer; the approach I would take is to use a listing of all the files (ls command in the Terminal) and manipulate it in a program like BBEdit using regular expressions to make a tab separated file you can import into Bookpedia. (At the moment the text import does not let you import a link, but that is something I could add for the next version.)

E.i. ls gives you

Code: Select all

2004_Cocoa Programming_Sams.pdf 
2002_Advance Programming_Sams.pdf

you would turn into the following for import:

Code: Select all

2004    Cocoa Programming    Sams    file://Users/me/PDFs/2004_Cocoa Programming_Sams.pdf
2002    Advance Programming    Sams    file://Users/me/PDFs/2002_Advance Programming_Sams.pdf