some remarks using custom data sources

[Robby Stephenson]

I've added bug reports for several of your suggestions.

On Sun, Feb 8, 2026 at 4:41 PM Robby Stephenson <robby at periapsis.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 7:54 PM Tomasz Golinski <tomaszg at math.uwb.edu.pl> wrote:
> > 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.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516055

> > 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.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516056

> > 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.

Found a workaround for next release, though not sure of the root cause
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516054

> > 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.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516057

--
Robby