Author Topic: Re: Deleting from People View - according to Anson  (Read 8826 times)

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Offline Anson

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Re: Deleting from People View - according to Anson
« on: September 18, 2009, 01:02:40 am »
Deleting people doesn't just make them invisible, it actually deletes the record.

NO: I just tested it on a new database with v0.9.9.13, and besides a problem with refresh not working automatically, it worked as expected, if i remember exactly which state the entries have (invisible entries shown, or having really visible entries):

- adding two movies only shows grey actors in the people list since i don't auto-download people's info, and only one or both of the movies are shown for them. To see the actors, i have set the filter to show all people including grey invisible actors.
- when i delete one such grey actor, the record is removed completely since it is already an invisible record.

- downloading people's info with a plugin causes the data to be loaded, but the actor still looks grey in the list until i manually refresh the list with F5 (this is at least a feature, if not a real (small, minor) bug). then the actor is shown with white background and appears also when resetting the filters to normal (only visible shown)
- (before the next step, i have set the filters back to also show invisible records)
- pushing the DEL key with one of these white actors selected first asks me the security question (with the hint to hold CTRL to completely delete the record), and then the actor is removed from the list of actors, but only until I refresh the list again with F5 (same as above: feature or bug, that i have to manually refresh?). After using F5, the actor is shown to be back on the list as grey entry, and thus it was NOT deleted completely. This is exactly what should happen {edit:} except for the fact that now even the invisible record still has all the info and not only info for the two movies like at the beginning when the actors were added invisibly with only visible movies being listed.

lessons from the above tests:
- use F5 often
- if you don't autodownload actor's info, records for people are invisible (you can see them, but only if the filter is set to show invisible records), and deleting them deletes them completely
- if an actor is visible (because of autodownload or manual update), deleting it behaves like deleting visible movies: it only makes it invisible unless CTRL is held down too.
- the actor's record will never be the same minimal record again like in the beginning, unless it is deleted completely together with many movies, and movie info for all related movies is downloaded again (see also the warning in the preferences: "these changes can not be undone easily")


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This doesn't surprise me, as normally there are no "invisible" people.

hehe, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0220238/ :-)

more serious: there are also no invisible movies which you can see. But you probably autodownload all people's data when importing a movie, and THEN, there really never are "invisible" records in people view.


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If a person is no longer associated with any visible movies, then it would be logical to make them invisible.

Sounds nice, but would raise another problem: users should be allowed to have actors even if none of their pictures are currently visible, eg because i just started to add movies by following a filmography (first step: create actor, second step: download actor, third and fourth steps: follow links in filmography and download movies; alternate third step when following your above logic: make the actor invisible, removing his filmography, before being able to follow links from the filmography to download movies).

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Conversely, if the user "deletes" a person who is still associated with visible movies, then the record should be make invisible, not actually deleted. Deleting people should be a way of stripping a record of all the information from the record, except for the links to existing visible movies. In other words, the same behaviour as for deleting movies.

According to my tests above, it seems to be done just like you suggest.

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To fix the situation where a person has been accidentally deleted, update the movie they were previously associated with. Then update the person's record as well—that will restore them to any other movies they might have been associated with.

might work ... but depending on your method to work with people (I almost never download info for people), maybe the actor would have to be deleted again (with DEL, and NOT with CTRL+DEL) to make him invisible again, and even that would still leave lots of info in the invisible record.
« Last Edit: September 18, 2009, 01:13:00 am by Anson »

Offline rick.ca

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Re: Deleting from People View - according to Anson
« Reply #1 on: September 18, 2009, 03:29:50 am »
I don't know why you should so readily assume otherwise, but the behaviour I described is exactly as I described it. It has nothing to do with failing to refresh the display. So why do you suppose we're observing different behaviour? What, exactly, do you mean by "i don't auto-download people's info"? Have you selected Show people added from movie credits? If not, you comments may not be relevant to the way most of us the program.

More to the point, what is your advice to mumin, now that you have contradicted mine?

Offline Anson

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Re: Deleting from People View - according to Anson
« Reply #2 on: September 18, 2009, 06:34:21 am »
just for the people (especially mumin and nostra) who might be overwhelmed otherwise, i have moved the most important last part of this followup to the top here ...

More to the point, what is your advice to mumin, now that you have contradicted mine?

I think i agreed with you and not contradicted you on how to fix the problem of restoring a deleted people record:
To fix the situation where a person has been accidentally deleted, update the movie they were previously associated with. Then update the person's record as well—that will restore them to any other movies they might have been associated with.
might work ... but depending on your method to work with people (I almost never download info for people), maybe the actor would have to be deleted again (with DEL, and NOT with CTRL+DEL) to make him invisible again, and even that would still leave lots of info in the invisible record.

all the contradictions are only related to how the problem occured in the first place and whether it always happens. And there was no talk yet about whether the "not auto-refreshing" (which btw also happens on other occasions like some editing/updating of movies etc) should be considered to be normal, only a feature, or a (minor) bug.

first and most important: mumin needs to answer nostra's question
did you hold ctrl while deleting the person?
If yes, then just do not do it next time ;)
if no then I will need to take a look at the code...

second: if the answer is no, mumin might follow my tests to see whether it is only a misunderstanding because of the refresh problem or something, before nostra starts digging the code

third (and to clarify whether rick and I really got different results): you might follow my steps exactly and tell what you found, and/or describe the steps you did while testing. I will gladly follow them, trying to reproduce your problem of always immediately deleting visible records, and report whether i get the same problem.




I don't know why you should so readily assume otherwise, but the behaviour I described is exactly as I described it.

you wrote:
- Deleting people doesn't just make them invisible, it actually deletes the record.

and i did some tests and found that on my installation,
- people are not always deleted completely, but only when they already were invisible or ctrl-del is used, and
- records were sometimes not shown temporarily although they really were not deleted.

since this seemed to contradict each other, i listed more details under wich conditions people were deleted on my system and under which conditions they were not, and which additional facts might make someone believe that records were visible or invisible although they had a different state.
In doing so, I also tried describing what i consider to be a bug (the refresh problem) since that might mislead people to think something happened or didn't happen which really didn't happen, causing them to mess up the database themselves.

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It has nothing to do with failing to refresh the display. So why do you suppose we're observing different behaviour?

if you observe that records are always deleted and i observe that they are only deleted depending on some conditions, it is different and not only supposed, isn't it ?

to find out what might cause the differences, we would have to compare all our little differences in setup or what we did differently while testing. concerning my tests: did you do the same test which i described step by step ?
did you "download info on people with IMDB plugin" for some (grey or white) actor, refresh the display, then select the white record and push DEL (without holding control), confirm the deletion, no longer see the record in the list, refresh the display again and then see the record again? I did this at least 8-10 times for different and the same actors and always found that they were not deleted but only made invisible (with detailed info still intact).
If you did the same and found that always "Deleting people doesn't just make them invisible, it actually deletes the record", we are in trouble like nostra said.

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What, exactly, do you mean by "i don't auto-download people's info"?
Have you selected Show people added from movie credits?
If not, you comments may not be relevant to the way most of us the program.

yes, i was speaking of exactly that option, but no, i have deselected it.
To limit the size of downloads and of the database and because i mostly want to use PVD not as replacement for using IMDB, but only to keep track offline of which DVDs I own, which movies i recorded from TV, what might be items for a wishlist, where i put them all and what i haven't watched yet, I have deselected all those additional options to Show people added from movie credits and Show movies added from Filmography. For now, it's good enough for me to have filmographies of those few actors or directors where i try to collect a set of their best movies and look everything else up on the web (if i start browsing people, i might end up anyplace in IMDB :-)

When we both do the same ("downloading people info" and "deleting people records"; you do it always and i did it just for this test) and for one of us records are always deleted but not for the other, we might see the same problem differently often, but it is irrelevant how we use the program normally to determine if there is some problem at all, EXCEPT if the above option would change the behaviour of PVD while deleting records.

Offline Anson

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Re: Deleting from People View - according to Anson
« Reply #3 on: September 19, 2009, 04:19:10 am »
It seems that the problem is detected:

..., but it is irrelevant how we use the program normally to determine if there is some problem at all, EXCEPT if the above option would change the behaviour of PVD while deleting records.

It seems the behaviour is fundamentally different depending on the setting of Show people added from movie credits. Selecting this setting causes all invisible movies to become visible, and then the delete behaviour is as I describe above. If the setting is not selected, then, according to Anson's testing, the behaviour is analogous to how delete and ctrl-delete work for movies.

Our discussion was a bit complicated :-)
but now that we know the cause of the problems and misunderstandings, this "side-thread" about the tests probably is needed at most for reference and can be closed.


one last PS:
To recap how people records are managed when the Show people added from movie credits is not used:
  • Updating movie records adds people as invisible records. They're invisible in the sense their only purpose is to show the person's name in the movie credits. No other information is recorded, and they're therefore hidden in People View.
  • Credit links will go to either the person's IMDb page, or their record in People View. The Click and Ctrl-Click behaviour is set at Preferences - Miscellaneous. So you have a choice if you want to see any information about the person. If you elect to view their PVD record, the link will take you to People view and make the record visible. You can then update the record to download the IMDb information. Now that the record is visible, its link colour (in the movie credits) and click behaviour will change.

movies are handled similar to the above, having lots of invisible movies from connection info like follows, spoofs, etc.

I have neither flag for "show people/movies" set (to limit data to what I want), and to not accidentally do the wrong type of click (click vs. ctrl-click) and thus make visible movies or people, i have set the options in preferences - misc:
- follow the internal link in PVD ("switch to record") with a normal click if the record is already visible,
- or with a CTRL-click when it is still invisible and would be made visible by clicking.
- follow the external link to the internet ("open in browser") with CTRL-click for available/visible records,
- or a simple click when it is invisible and would cause the record to become visible.

Now i can always normal-click on all links without accidentally making records visible,
and if i want to do something else (get to my internet source for a closer look or make invisible links visible), i always have to use CTRL while clicking.

using these settings for clicking, i also rarely have to delete (make invisible) some records for either movies or people because i didn't get the records in the first place :-)
« Last Edit: September 19, 2009, 04:56:35 am by Anson »