some remarks using custom data sources

[Robby Stephenson]

Hi Tomasz,

Thanks for the wonderful email and feedback.

On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 7:54 PM Tomasz Golinski <tomaszg at math.uwb.edu.pl> wrote:
>
> 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?

For custom collections, Tellico will look for a description,
publisher, or year field.
https://invent.kde.org/office/tellico/-/blob/master/src/fetch/fetchresult.cpp?ref_type=heads#L143

> 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.

Thanks for that feedback. Those arXiv and PubMed items are there since
the external scripts were initially targeted at bibliographies, and
they do seem out of place now. Let me see if I can figure out a way to
improve the search window as you suggest.

> 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.

Sure. The spec file that gets used now in the config is probably the
easiest. Having a way to read that to add a new source could be handy.

> 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.

In testing a few things now, I do see a repeatable crash. I need to
fix that. I expect it's the same one you experienced.

> 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.

Good idea, some button or timeout would be good, along with running in
a separate thread.

> 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.

I'll see if I can figure that one out. I haven't seen it before, but I
don't often return images in the scripts. How are you including the
image in the result, by base64?

> 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.

Right-click on the group name -> Filter by Group. I did remove that as
an automatic thing from just selecting the group since I got a fair
amount of feedback that it was confusing.

> 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?

There's no automatic way, it's coded in each individual entry
template. Maybe I can add that to the template config.

> 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.

If Tellico is currently running, you can use the dbus interface to
export to HTML
$  qdbus6 org.kde.tellico /Tellico org.kde.tellico.exportHTML out.html
https://docs.kde.org/trunk_kf6/en/tellico/tellico/dbus-interface.html#dbus-examples

Bruno also has a more sophisticated set-up here:
https://github.com/bcornec/tellico2html

> 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 add ".tc" by hand.

I believe that's a function of the file manager interface. With
Plasma, the extension does get automatically added if I leave it off
the filename. Running outside Plasma, such as GNOME or Windows, I'm
not sure how that's handled. Do other KDE applications add the file
extensions and Tellico doesn't?

Robby