I must be doing something wrong..

As you may, or may not, have read, I am trying to import roughly 50 manual profiles (made by someone else) into my own DB, but I have some manual ID that are identical, and I obviously don't want my own manual profiles to be overwritten by his. So, what I'd like to do is change the ID either on his, or mines (preferably his, I'd have less profiles to change).

Giga suggested I cloned these profiles to new Manual profiles that have a different ID from mine, using BulkEdit. Great idea, so I set out to try it.

I downgraded DVD Profiler to v3.1 (just to be safe), installed v.1.05 of BulkEdit. I then restored the other guy's db into an empty database. So far so good.

Now, I know that the highest Manual ID used in my own DB is 20. To be on the safe side, I decided I'd clone up to M25 (so that's 21 profiles, M5 to M25). I flagged these, then I went to "Collection -> Flagged -> Clone to Manual", left the locality alone to US, clicked "Copy Cast/Crew".

At that point, it seems to be doing something, as the progress bar at the bottom of the list flashes, but no. Once it's done, nothing happens. No new profiles were created.

Do I understand this function wrong? Or am I doing something wrong?

Quoting RossRoy:

Quote:
Do I understand this function wrong? Or am I doing something wrong?

No, it's probably a bug. You should have gotten new clones starting at 21 (M5->M21, M6->M22, ... M25 ->M41 ).


- Check the log - see if anything there. Also, if you run it again, watch the main collection closely and see if the profile appears momentarily, then disappears.

What I'm doing is backing out the change indiscriminately in case of any kind of error. I put this together quickly to support some stuff Giga was doing, so there are not a lot of error messages and recovery paths that have been tested.

If you want to try something else, create a collection.xml of the ones you want to clone, and then edit the XML carefully with new profileIDs (you can blank out the UPC - they will be recreated automatically) and XML import. Edit: But I don't import cast/crew - forgot about that ...

Sorry it didn't work for you. I'll PM you with my email address if you decide you want to send me the file for debugging purposes - it may be too late to help you this time around, but if I can find the bug, it will be ready for the next time, or for others.

Edit: Oh I didn't notice Giga's post. Follow his advice first. He actually has more experience with it than I do. I only wrote it - he suggested it and then used it. 

Quoting mediadogg:

Quote:
- Check the log - see if anything there. Also, if you run it again, watch the main collection closely and see if the profile appears momentarily, then disappears.

Where can I see the log?

And while it is supposedly working, the selected profile in the list doesn't change, and nothing appears and disappears. Really it's basically only the progress bar at the bottom that flashes.

As for what Giga suggested, well I did exactly what he said, and nothing happens. No new profiles are created. The total number of profiles in the owned list stays at 50. There's no duplicate titles either.

I'm willing to help further if you want to debug it.

Quoting RossRoy:

Quote:
Quoting surfeur51:

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You really don't want to use fake UPC ? Works fine, quickly done, no disadvantage...

I'd rather not, because it makes them easier to pick out with the IDs starting with M. (I know, I could set up a tag, but I don't want to)

And since there is, theoretically a way to do it with BulkEdit, I'd rather do it with BulkEdit.

I appreciate it. It is hard to create test data to cover all the bases. I PM'ed you my email so I can do some debugging, and I'll keep you posted.

Oops, the Log is undercover in clone mode. Sorry. I was thinking about the dialog box.

Quoting RossRoy:

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Email sent. Thanks a lot mediadogg for your help!

Ok, I see the problem. Actually, what I'm doing is documented, but easily overlooked. I am treating the manual ID as a "strict" profile ID - "M" followed by eactly 12 numeric digits (.locality). Don't know why I didnt realize that this was more restrictive than profiler. So, the "error" that was causing the cloning not to work was "invalid" profileID. For example, your profile IDs look like M1 instead of M000000000001.

I can fix this easily of course to accept the truncated form. Just wanted to let you know.

Edit: Actually turned out to be several small bugs that added up to "nasty". RossRoy is testing the fixes now.

Version 1.07 is available:

DVDSpot Import
Made improvements suggested by CalebandCo
- Corrected creation of Watched event date
- No longer putting owned_custom into Purchase Place Web Site

Clone Profile
Fixed bugs uncovered by RossRoy
- Restriction on recognition of Manual UPCs with less than 12 digits removed
- Improved error handling to tolerate missing data in profiles and missing cover art

The manual profile ID format restriction is also imposed on CSV and XML import. This has not yet been fixed, but will be addressed in a later release.

V1.07 should run on 3.5 Beta, but does not yet support the new fields or custom genres.

Note: As the version 3.5 Beta 1204 has introduced profile cut/paste, in the future it should be the preferred method to transfer data from one profile to another. Personal choice will dictate when the use of BulkEdit may be beneficial in order to reduce the workload when many profiles are involved.

@mediadogg

I've been downloading your plugin since version 0.81.  Someday soon, I hope to find the time to check it out.  It sounds very useful.  I just haven't found time to check it out, what with new episodes on broadcast TV and version 3.5 of Profiler competing for my free time.

I truly believe you've earned those 4-stars under your name.

Quoting tweeter:

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Just started using BulkEdit yesterday.  Tried it first on my laptop where i have a v3.1 database.  That worked just fine.

On my desktop i've been running the Beta in parallel and i just upgraded from Beta 1195 to 1211 this morning.  I noticed after the upgrade to 1211 that all the NR ratings (locality US) were blank.  I can manually fix them but according to this forum the tool should work with the Beta.

Problem is i can't get the Rating field to change.  And not just from "NULL" to NR.  I tried changing an R to NC-17.  The simulation worked and no errors were encountered when i applied the change.  The last edited field was updated to today.

I tried updating Genres and that worked just fine.

Here's the log for the R to NC-17 attempt.

Quote:
10/30/2008 10:56:30 AM: Profile update process started.
043396040144 - [Rating], simulated change: from {} to {NC-17}
043396040144- Profile update simulation - no changes saved.
10/30/2008 10:56:32 AM: Profile update process completed.
10/30/2008 10:56:43 AM: Profile update process started.
043396040144 - [Rating], database change: from {} to {NC-17}
043396040144- Profile updated and saved successfully
10/30/2008 10:56:46 AM: Profile update process completed.

Is it something i'm doing wrong or a known beta thing?

Thanks

You are doing nothing wrong. The latest release of BulkEdit attempts a bit of 3.5 support, but cannot do the complete job because the updated Plugin Developer's kit has not been provided. So while we lucked out and Genres works OK, I cannot hanlde new Ratings or the new Blu_Ray regions and some other things until a later time. About all BulkEdit can do now is display the Ratings that are compatible with the old localities.dod file.

Appreciiate your patience. Since I now consider this to be my "flagship", containing my best programming methods, I will update it at the earliest opportunity.