[Tellico-users] Tellico 2.0pre2 Released

[Alex Lancaster]

>>>>> Robby Stephenson  writes:

> On Sunday 06 September 2009, Alex Lancaster wrote:
>> 1. I recently got my CueCat barcode scanner (which was gathering dust
>> in a closet) working for scanning for the ISBN.  It's a
>> non-"defanged" one, meaning that it needs the parsing code to get
>> the ISBN number.  This works well when using the entry box and
>> searching against Amazon or LOC.  But when I attempt to use the
>> CueCat in the "multiple ISBN" dialog tellico doesn't apparently
>> decode the the CueCat output into an ISBN, it actually causes the
>> multiple entry dialog to either disappear or fill with garbage.

> Yeah, I should probably figure out how to get the validator to work there, 
> too.

That would be a big help, thanks.

>> 2. When I choose a title in the list and right-click to update from a
>> source, say, Amazon, the information in the lower pane doesn't
>> update immediately

> Ah, thanks, I'll work on that.

I also managed to generate a couple of crashes, the first was when
adding a particular entry (just posted the crash in a separate e-mail
report), the second occurred when I attmpted to select a number of
books and change a value across multiple entries.  I think I narrowed
this down to a single problematic entry, which crashed whenever I try
to edit it which I'll try to send the crash in a separate e-mail.

A couple of other little UI bugs I noticed:

1. I can select a grouping variable, "Author", "Title" etc. and it
   will be remembered between application restarts for all fields
   except for "<People>".  If I select that, then on restart it
   defaults back to "Author".

2. If I create a "Filter" or "Loans" and select the overall filter
   (not just elements in the filter), then in the lower right pane it
   shows only the icons for the books in that filter, but the list of
   entries in the top-right pane remains the full list.  I would
   expect that the list would also be filtered to that subset.  Either
   way, it seems inconsisent for the two right panes to be showing
   different subsets of data.  Basically it seems the list of entries
   shown in the top-right pane never changes no matter what is
   selected, which clashes with the way most cataloguing applications
   from rhythmbox to iTunes do it, which is to filter the list view
   based on the the browsed or searched entities.

>> 1. I notice that fields never appear to auto-complete.  For example, I
>> added a new field "Purchase Location" for bookstore or city in
>> which I purchase a book.  [...]  Does this feature exist for some
>> fields, has it ever been considered for tellico?

> You have to turn on "Allow grouping.." for the field to have auto-
> completion. Open up the field dialog to edit that.

Thanks for that, that seems to work as expected.

>> 2. The "Purchase Date" field appears to be free-form text, it doesn't
>> attempt to validate the date in any way, is there anyway to enable
>> this, does it need to be implemented?

> There's no validation, but you can change it to a full Date field rather 
> than a free text field.

I looked for that as a "Type" under the "Collection Fields" dialog.
Under the "Type" drop-down list is: "Simple Text", "Paragraph",
"Number", "URL" and "Table", but no "Date" option.  Is there some
other way of setting the field type?

Alex