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Fix Genre/Category Support

Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2016 7:10 am
by wayloncovil
I've been using Argus TV for quite a few months and I'm very pleased with it.
There's really only a single limitation that I've found that I would ask for improvement in the next version.
I'm a user in the United States and I have a Schedules Direct account.
Apparently when categories are attached to an item in Schedules Direct, they are separated by commas. Argus doesn't parse these into separate Genres/Categories.
Instead, an entry for Action is seen as a category and Action,Adventure is seen as another category.
What we should be seeing is a single category for Action and another category for Adventure.
See attached screen shot.
I'd really like the category function to work correctly.
Because, if the category function is working correctly, that would mean that the Upcoming Suggestions feature of Argus would work correctly.
What do I mean by working correctly? Well, if I want to have Argus monitor items that are for Action, I would have to enter all the categories for "Action". Those would be "Action" "Action,Adventure" and so forth. That's not great because it ends up returning way too many hits.
That's it.
There's nothing else I really want. It's pretty much perfect in every other way. :)
Thanks!

Re: Fix Genre/Category Support

Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2016 3:21 pm
by Christoph21x
Dear wayloncovil

Thanks for your input!
As I see from your screenshot, these are really "concurrent categories", not "hierarchical" like "Family; Children; Children Adventure".
The main problem is, that Argus is not at all capable to handle multiple categories like designed in the (inofficial) XMLTV spec.
The import that you show with the screenshot is even not according to it.

If it were, you would only see the first part of it see within the schedulers choice, as Argus only regards the first occurency of category per show.

Would it mean a help to you, if you'd only see the FIRST of multiple occurencies? I programmed a small utility to handle the order of (hierarchical) categories, it could probably easily be extended to "filter out" everything after a semicolon - if you would want.
Please check, if this could help you out.

Kind greetz - Chris

Re: Fix Genre/Category Support

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2016 2:33 am
by wayloncovil
Chris,

Thanks for your reply.

I'm using geoffstewart's Schedules Direct importer. I could ask him to follow the spec by only returning a single category. But, I really think that we lose value by Argus allowing only a single category per show.

Since most shows have multiple categories, I'm of the opinion that a feature enhancement should be created requesting Argus to handle multiple categories per program. Some shows just make sense to have multiple categories.

This leads me to another question. And I want to be delicate here because I know the developer is donating lots of time for Argus and I don't want to sound ungrateful at all because I'm very grateful for Argus. So, what should my expectation be regarding additional features/enhancements to Argus?

Thanks!