Actually I am very deep in comparing my profiles with the list of accepted birthyears (and I have to do countless corrections) and this way got to a problem of the update process which probably could be solved with a tool of a programmer?

The problem is: If there is a cast- (or crew-)member only WITH a birthyear and a new profile to be added has the same person WITHOUT birthyear, profiler doesn't create the one but uses the first available one WITH birthyear - and this way the data is wrong as soon as the profile is added.

So it would be neccessary to have every cast & crew WITHOUT a birthyear as soon as there is the same name WITH birthyear in the local database. As there are countless names in each databse meanwhile, I hopefully think that an AddOn could solve this problem within minutes?

It only has one job: Checking the cast- & crew-lists, and whenever it finds a person with BY, the next check is, if the same name is available without BY, and if not: create one!

Is this technically possible? Without causing too much work for you?

For example if you load the profile list with the profiles from your database and the set the variants table to a pair of entries, one with and one without the BY and do the scan. Maybe something like that ...

Quoting Magmadrag:

Quote:
@mediadogg: Would you be so kind and give me a link for CLTBoss?

And: Your second post I am absolutely unable to understand.

There are several tools available which can do this and that. A read several descriptions but was not able to find THAT function I (and in my opinion: all users) would need to have. So I started this thread especially for programmers like you who know their tools much better as any description could be.

As I have given up the hope for any update in close future, I try to solve a problem of an extraorginary size.

Just for your imagination: I am not done with letter B of the BY-List (http://www.luigifilocamo.it/BY.html) and had to correct actors in more than 100 profiles. Only a few of them are wrong in the central database, but the rest got wrong by download as I didn't have actors w/o birthyear. Until I am done with the complete list it might last months. And especially then I want to avoid that such mistakes become part of my local database again.

Somehow I thought I made CLTBoss for you. My bad. Read about it here:

http://www.invelos.com/Forums.aspx?task=viewtopic&topicID=1003379&PageNum=1

It is not profile-specific..... but as an example, I'll try it more visually....

I start the tool at any profile (I am quite sure that I need to start it twice, once for cast and once for crew) and the tool checks out all actors in the cast list. Then it reachs an actor with a birthyear:



The tool now sees, that "David Brown" WITH Birthyear already is in the list WITHOUT Birthyear, too. So it can go on in the list. Then it reachs another actor with a birthyear:



So "James Anderson" is only available WITH Birthyear. So now the tool directly goes to



And creates this "James Anderson" WITHOUT a Birthyear



When this is done the tools goes on through the whole list of cast and does the same job for every actory where it is neccessary.

Quoting GSyren:

Quote:
If you do a full database repair, the name will be gone.

This only happens by a full repair, but with the customized repair, I only have to uncheck the "delete unused cast/crew"

Quoting GSyren:

Quote:
So if an update comes down without a BY for an actor that should have a BY, then it will accepted without a BY since there is such a cast entry in your database. Thus you get an incorrect linkage to the Non-BY actor.

But if the profile I download should have a BY but doesn't and there is no entry with BY available, Profiler automatically uses the first entry WITH BY. So to stay at "David Brown": If I wouldn't have the none-BY-Version and download a new profile with no BY (altough it should have e. g. 1947) then I also get the wrong linkage as profiler then uses "David Brown (1916)"

I am not sure how many people have ever recognized how HUGE this problem is! Like mentioned in former posts: Actually I am working very hard to check and correct the BYs. For some there have been the wrong ones, for countless the BY is accepted and official but most of the profiles including that person never got an update (that's another very huge problem) and this way: It is nice to have the Birthyears, but quite less of the profiles really have them.

But maybe (a very big MAYBE) your suggestion would cause another tool: Similar to the duplicate search something like a "BY-Search". To talk about myself: Whenever I add a new disc, I do this in "ordered". If cast & crew is available, I move it to "owned", if not, I first type them down and then I move it to owned. So to solve that problem you mentioned: A tool which "knows" all the accepted/released BYs and checks all cast & crew in any profile I want it to check if there is any cast/crew WITHOUT a BY but is in the list WITH a BY. So then I know that I have to check this person if I allready have it in my database with one BY or another.

Now I only can hope that the description of the 2nd tool wasn't too complicated. The wrong linkages I am actually cleaning up (and this will last months), and to avoid to new ones, only this 2nd check-up-tool could handle that.

Thanks a lot! I'll give it a try as soon as possible.
But you say it's a listing "only"? Causing manual work to do the creation?

For sure I don't want to sound outrageous in any way, but just imagine having 20.000+ actoris with a BY.... horrible imagination to create new entries for only 10 % of them

I need to re-read this thread a few more times. The example was perfect. I know the problem is not profile specific, but the tool needs to scan profiles to get to cast and crew, so that's why the example makes sense.

Actually let me take a look at the API more carefully, and see if there is a sneaky way to access the Cast and Crew tables globally by scanning those tables instead of profiles. If so, would that work?

If not, I think I can envision a magic trick:

(1) Scan all profiles and create a dictionary of cast and crew entries.
(2) Scan the dictionary and look for the cases in your example
(3) Using a dummy profile, add the required cast and crew entry, saving the profile each time
(4) When done, delete the dummy profile. The cast and crew entries should remain defined, even though unused the moment.

I will mess around with this someday soon.

Quoting GSyren:

Quote:
So yeah, it's just a listing. If it's no help at all, then sorry!

Well, I wanted to try... but I can't! I would need to export my (whole) collection to xml and export doesn't work anymore. It runs and runs... and at about 99 % the Error-Popup comes... I got an xml but with Zero KB size. So in this case I got no chance to try it.

Is there any chance that the tool opens the "Actors"-File in the programm folder (no idea if the DAT or the IDX is relevant) but this would avoid (the for me impossible) export