Thanks Mika,

It's always gratifying to hear that others find my programs useful. I do write them mainly for my own use, but I try to make them useful for others too.

Just when you're sure that Gunnar can't make it better, he does. Greenie 

Okay, I would like some user input here. I have been contemplating doing something to make it possible to mix and-logic with or-logic in ProfilerQuery. I don't want to make it more complicated than necessary, user wise or programming wise. I have been thinking about this for a while, and my current idea is to make the selection something like this:



This example would correspond to (If Region = 1 AND Audio Content = Spanish) OR (Locality = Spain)
It may become a bit long if you want to include many selection criteria, but I really don't want to get into parsing free text with parenthesis, as this would be immensely more complicated and error prone.

As you can see in the mockup, there are only four type of statements: IF block, SELECT statement, UNSELECT statement and COMMENT statement. Actually, UNSELECT isn't really needed, but in some cases it may be simpler to add an IF statement and an UNSELECT, rather than wrapping a large logic block with another IF statement to exclude something.

You could actually start with a SELECT statement to include everything, and then use IF and UNSELECT to exclude what you don't want. In some cases that might make for a simpler logic.

I have also contemplated adding logic to select boxset parents based on properties in child profiles, and select child profiles based on properties in the parent profile. This would, however, not be in the initial release, if at all.

Note that I do not propose to replace the current selection system. This would either be a selectable alternative system, or a totally separate program (ProfilerQuery Extended).

At the moment I am trying to decide if it is at all worth the effort to implement something like this. So I would like to hear your opinions. How useful - if at all - do you think this would be?

Quoting GSyren:

Quote:
Well, not much interest.

May be you are too hasty. Wait a little more before shelving... I myself found the idea interesting but I cannot think about it further before the week-end when work is over and I can profile and play 

Say Hello to ProfilerQuery 2.9.0

As you probably know, right clicking on a title in the result brings up the front cover scan. Now, if you hold down shift while right clicking, you get the back cover scan instead.

The front image is a thumbnail. The back image is the regular back image sized to full screen height. The reasoning behind the different handling is that you probably only want to see the front image in order to identify the title, in case you have several profiles with the same title, or you just want to be reminded what it looks like.

On the other hand, if you want to look at the back cover you are probably interested in some printed information, so showing the back cover as large as possible is probably desirable. The resizing is unexpectedly slow, so don't be surprised if it take a few moments to appear. How legible it will be depends, of course, on the quality of the original front image.

Time for ProfilerQuery 2.11.0

What's new:
- Renamed "Is Missing or Blank" to just "Is Missing" (see note below).
- Added "Is Not Missing" to string comparisons.
- Added "Is Missing" and "Is Not Missing" to date comparisons.
- Restyled toolwindows, and made a minor change to main window style.
- Changed to my standard About Window.

Why the renaming of "Is Missing of Blank"? Well, let me start by giving you an analogy. If you wanted some milk, you wouldn't care if you found an empty milk container in your fridge, or if you didn't find one at all. The result would be the same. You're out of milk.

The "missing or blank" is a similar thing. While it is two different situations in a programming sense, the difference is totally irrelevant to the user. The data isn't there. So the text in the user interface shouldn't bother the user with programming details. It's one of the challenges for a developer; to change from looking at things from a programming perspective to a user perspective. It's something that a lot of us developers often fail at. Even after years of creating user interfaces. 

The case of "Is Not Missing" is a a bit different. Neither that nor "Is Missing" are really necessary. A standard "Is" or "Is Not" selection with an empty value field would suffice. But that may not be immediately obvious. And since I thought it would be useful to search for missing values I added "Is Missing". But I didn't think to add "Is Not Missing" and that creates a problem. If someone actually needs to test if something is not missing, it may look like ProfilerQuery can't do that.

So, now that "Is Missing" and "Is Not Missing" has been added for date fields, maybe you would like to select profiles that are missing production year. And you'll be disappointed to find that ProfilerQuery won't let you do that. Why? Well, DVD Profiler doesn't save production year as a date, just as a number, and a missing production year is saved as zero. So what? Well, ProfilerQuery treats all numeric fields the same, and zero doesn't necessarily mean that something is missing. It can be a perfectly valid number. So if you want to check for missing production year you need to check for production year zero. Just so you know.

ProfilerQuery 2.13.0
What? Another update again???

Well, you know how it is. Or perhaps you don't? Well anyway, one tinkers with a program and releases an update. But the program stays in ones mind, and the cogs keep turning while one is doing other things, or even sleeping. And suddenly a thought pops up. Shouldn't this program be able to do this or that.

And that's what happened. I had been using ProfilerQuery, and I kept going to Profiler to check on things or update things. And afterwards I thought - it would be so much easier if I could just double click an entry in the result list and be taken automatically to that profile in DVD Profiler. And wouldn't you know, the very next thought was - surely that must be possible to do?

And, with a little tinkering, it was. So that's what's in this update. I'll try to stop thinking about ProfilerQuery for a while now. 

Edit: Almost forgot to mention: The Profiler window cannot be minimized. It must be Normal or Maximized for this to work.

Since the documentation for ProfilerQuery was really out-of-date, I took some time to do a complete rewrite for the latest version. 

You can get it here.