Virtual library and opds feed

[Calan]

I’m on calibre 4.18 and use it for storing comics and ebooks. Comics are tagged with ‘comic’ along with suitable genre tags, and I have two virtual libraries - one showing just the comics, the other not.

I’ve just picked up chunky reader, which can pull comics from calibre server using opds, but I’m finding the feed a little limited.

I can go in tags and select the ‘comic’ tag to see just my comics, but that shows them all. I’d ideally like to be able to select my comic virtual library so I can then further filter the list by selecting a genre tag or series.

I appreciate this isn’t currently possible per this thread, but wonder if that’s a limit in the opds standard or just the implementation in calibre server?

If the latter, might this be considered for an enhancement?

[kovidgoyal]

OPDS is sufficiently poorly designed that I am not particularly motivated to implement this. Doesnt your OPDS client support search? If so you can simply use the same search expression you used to create the virtual library in the first place. And if it allows you to bookmark/save the search then it will work just as conveniently.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Doesnt your OPDS client support search? If so you can simply use the same search expression you used to create the virtual library in the first place.

And calibre supports searches limited to a virtual library with the vl: prefix.

[Calan]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Doesnt your OPDS client support search? If so you can simply use the same search expression you used to create the virtual library in the first place. And if it allows you to bookmark/save the search then it will work just as conveniently.

There’s only one comic reader app I’ve found so far that can browse opds feeds — Chunky (there could be more, but I stopped looking when I found Chunky after trialing three others). As far as I can tell, it just lets me browse the feed — no search. It support bookmarking ‘folders’, but that’s not the issue.

In Chunky, I select the cloud button, then select calibre/opds as the type, then enter the ip and port of the calibre server and Chunky shows a pop-up list of options like tags, series, authors, and at the bottom of the list, the name of the library. Clicking one of the earlier options gives a list of those items (eg, clicking “series” shows all the series names), and if I select one of those, it returns all books matching that selection. So if I click series, it shows all the series, and I’d ideally like to see just the comic series. It doesn’t let me select multiple options, like two tags. As soon as I click one, I see all matching books. I’m guessing that’s just how the calibre feed works?

I suppose part of the problem is when you get to the list of books, it just shows book title, rather than being configurable to allow displaying series name and number in the series, as I can do when pushing books to my kindle. Most comics are in series, and clicking the comic tag to see just comics means they’re all sorted by title, so not grouped together and not clear which comic is in which series, where it’d be nicer to have the list sorted by series, number and title. So I was hoping to be able to get a list of just comic series. I could go back and edit all the book titles to include this info, but really like the cleanliness of keeping series name and number out of it.

Chunky does support browsing and downloading from websites, so I can just browse the calibre site and skip opds, but frankly I prefer the streamlined experience of quickly going through a feed to find what I want to sync.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

OPDS is sufficiently poorly designed that I am not particularly motivated to implement this

I can appreciate that, especially if not too many use it. It’s certainly useable as is and I’ll stick with opds, but it just felt like an area that could benefit from a little tweaking, so I thought I’d raise the feedback since I am using the opds feature.

Anyway, thanks for calibre. Of the many programs I use personally, it’s one of the that few that I couldn’t do without!

[Calan]

Found a workaround.

Since the feed was showing the name of the physical library at the bottom of the list, I thought to add a new physical library and - lo and behold - the feed then showed both physical libraries. So I moved all my comics into the new 'comic' library and can now click into that first and then use the other filters (author, series, etc), to see only those for the comics.

I was liking the ability to use virtual libraries to be able to easily switch between seeing all my books and seeing just comics or books, but losing the ability to, for example, see everything by a certain author is a fair tradeoff for being able to get lists of just comic series, author, etc on the opds feed.

If you ever do revisit the opds feed, please consider adding the virtual libraries to the bottom of the feed, too.

[masp]

Is it possible for the user (eg. me) to make the opds "library" map to virtual library, via some calibre coding? I've been able to customize pretty much everything else: I find it hard to believe it's not possible to use calibre's template language to work around this limitation as well!