My thoughts on future Story Arc improvements

Enhancement requests or feature requests for future Mylar releases.
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stevvers
Posts: 14
Joined: Sat Oct 11, 2014 5:48 pm

My thoughts on future Story Arc improvements

Post by stevvers »

I know there's a thread already, but it seems to have mostly run its course and my ideas are a little different to those in that thread. I've found the collection of .cbl files on the Comic Rack forums to be quite extensive (at least for the major stuff) and it's not that difficult to create your own .cbl file in Comic Rack (once you have the metadata, learned that one the hard way!)

Easier list importing
Evilhero I know you mentioned that browsing to a file is proving difficult, perhaps we could point Mylar at a folder where the .cbl files are stored? Mylar can then ignore lists that have already been imported, or the folder can be used as a temporary location and the lists can be deleted by Mylar once imported (either way would be completely workable from a user-end)

Better list-based searching
As far as I can tell, when you select 'Search for missing', Mylar runs a single operation that slowly searches for each of the missing issues on the list. Given there is a 60 sec timeout on searches and some events run upwards of 100 issues, this can prove problematic. If anything forces a restart of Mylar, progress in this search is lost. I would propose a separate 'List Search' feature, which could operate in a similar way to the 'Backlog Search' from Sickbeard (if anyone is familiar) Basically it can run during 'downtime', or otherwise on a different cycle to the regular watchlist search. This would allow List Searches to be maintained separately from watchlist searching.

Individual issue location management
Many of the events that I manage via lists will include some titles which are part of my watchlisted series, and some which are not. It would be fantastic to be able to select individual issues in a list and set whether they are stored as part of the separate StoryArc folder or within the main collection.

Batch import/match items from folder
This one's simple. Like post-processing, but specifically for matching items on your Story Arc lists. It's linked to the above, as I don't necessarily want to keep every single series from a major event within my watchlist.

More prominent placement of List Management
This one's minor, but it takes 4 clicks to get to the page where I can import a new list. Now obviously I can bookmark the page directly, and I can understand if this feature is fairly new (I'm new to Mylar) and is somewhat hidden away until it is more stable. That said, I think 4 clicks is too much for a page I'm using regularly in a well-optimised WebUI.

Linking to Comic Vine's Story Arc section would be great, but as mentioned it's fairly messy and the Comic Rack CV Scraper currently doesn't support Story Arc metadata, so linking to that database would have very limited uses anyway. I think the above changes would make a massive improvement to the way the Story Arc feature functions.
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