some remarks using custom data sources

[Tomasz Golinski]

Hello,

For quite some time I have been using Tellico to catalogue cards from 
various collectible card games and I enjoy it a lot. My largest database 
hold over 17k items right now. At this moment my code supports 4-5 
games, including Magic: the Gathering, Star Wars Unlimited, Pokemon TCG 
and Lorcana. The support is in some cases only basic and I add features 
when I need them. My code is hosted at 
https://gitlab.com/tomaszg/tellico_stuff but I suppose I'm the only 
user... It uses a mixture of C++, Perl and Python, depending on the 
particular use case. Some are fully online, some require a pre-existing 
local dump of the database (usually simpler than to mess around with 
multiple request to API).

I have a couple of observations and remarks, some might constitute 
questions, some rather feature requests. Anyway, let me just share my 
experiences:

1. I never found out if it is possible to put anything into the 
"description" column of the "Internet search" result pane. Is there a 
way to do that?

2. More configurability would be splendid: for example introducing 
custom search field names to better fit the particular use case, or a 
possibility to enter a couple of parameters at the same time. To 
workaround this I reused some field names like "arXiv" or "LCCN" for my 
purposes. And to extend the search functionality by custom search 
syntax, like searching "s:XXX key" to look for a card "key" only in the 
set "XXX". Would be better to have more flexible search window.

3. It is somewhat tedious to set up external data sources on multiple 
machines - many fields need to be filled out, updated, and so on. Some 
idea would be to introduce some simple file format to describe a 
"plugin" which would provide a name of data source, basic syntax, type 
of collection and so on. Tellico would then read the file and set-up the 
source. That would make integrating other data sources much easier.

4. I get a crash quite often when I create a data source. I didn't try 
to produce a backtrace yet, as I don't create data sources that often.

5. Running external script blocks the rest of Tellico interface, it 
becomes unresponsive. Some of my scripts took some time to run, which 
was annoying. Also, it is not possible to stop a misbehaving script from 
inside of Tellico, one needs to kill it from console.

6. I get a funny problem with repeated searches for the same card. Quite 
often with subsequent searches Tellico ignores the image that was 
returned by the script. I actually need to restart Tellico to fix that.

Couple of minor things unrelated to data sources:

7.  I have one UI feature which I miss from the old Tellico 3 days: back 
then selecting a couple of items in the grouping panel or just clicking 
on a group name, automatically filtered the cards in the main pane. It 
was easy for example to visualise all the books by a certain author. It 
is still possible to do it with advanced filter, but as quick and 
convenient.

8. Would be nice to make it possible to make the image larger in the 
item view pane without messing with template files. Or maybe there is a 
way and I just missed it?

9. Automate export to html: would be also nice to be able to write a 
script which would update my html files with list of e.g. books 
automatically, with a script. Something like "tellico books.tc 
--export-html books.html" with possibility of some other options for 
sorting, grouping etc.

10. It is also weird that Tellico by default creates a file without any 
extension while saving a new collection. One needs to actually remember 
to ad ".tc" by hand.

Anyway, thanks for your work
Tomasz Golinski