Entered text gets changed after syncing

Movies Movie Collector
1

I’m not sure how widespread this issue is (i.e. what other text characters are involved, if any) but it’s been bugging me for a while regarding at least one character, the em dash.

In Movie Collector, whenever I enter an em dash (“—”) as the first character on one or more lines in the Notes section, after uploading to the cloud, then downloading to CLZ Movies, all of the em dashes in the first position get changed to simple hyphens, which is not at all what I want. Likewise, whenever I enter em dashes as first characters on lines in CLZ Movies, sync to the cloud, and then download to Movie Collector, all are again changed to simple hyphens.

This does not happen with Book Collector & CLZ Books. In both of those, any em dashes I enter remain that way after syncing in either direction.

Can you please check this, and fix it if it is a bug?

Many thanks.

2

That is strange indeed. Especially if there is a difference between the movie syncing and the book syncing.
Will check on that.

3

I’ve just tested this:

I’ve put this bit of text as is, in the PLOT and in the NOTES of a book, and of a movie, in WINDOWS.

I then synced on Windows.
Then synced on ANDROID.

The text was the same.

I then put the same text in a different movie/book on ANDROID, I then synced, then synced on Windows, and the text was still the same.

–

Can you provide a sure fire way for me to reproduce this?

This is the text I used:


A novel about fate, power, — EM DASH IN MIDDLE OF TEXT — and - NORMAL DASH IN MIDDLE OF TEXT - opportunity, and class; about inno

— EM DASH AT BEGINNING OF NEW LINE
— EM DASH again at begin of new line
- normal dash
— another EM DASH

— another EM DASH

below will be a loose EM DASH, followed by new line normal dash:

—
-
1 Like
4

Thank you for testing this.
It’s very strange, though, that it works OK for you, though I’m happy it does. This makes it seem, then, like something in my Windows 10 system or my Android 13 phone is causing the character (and oddly, just this one character!) to change to a hyphen when in the first position. Mid-text em dashes have never been a problem, though I’ll check this more thoroughly now too.

OK, I got some research to do.
Thanks again!

5

Alright, let me know what you find.

I did check your collection today by the way, and I noticed that you have a lot of plot changes you made with episodes, disc information, I found a BBC customer service number in the plot as well, all kinds of links to episodes, or dvd series, in the plot.

Then in Notes, there seems to be like a template for personal information such as purchase price and order date, and shipping date and… well, a LOT.

Our Cloud system/sync system can do things if you’re using HTML in plot or notes. So if you dive deeper into this, make sure to also look if you use HTML, and if the problem is the same in book as in movie if you see it, by using the exact same plot/notes as a test.

6

Thanks.
Yeah, I use the Plot & Notes sections differently than probably intended, more as places to store different types of detailed info (e.g. important back cover text & details, important lines from the copyrights page [title page verso] (for books), etc., so I can search on any of it later if need be, something I can’t do from a back cover image alone, for instance. I do the same with these sections for my book collection. The plot info is there somewhere, like from the back cover, copied from a major bookseller or the publisher, etc.

And yeah, it’s sometimes a lot of info, with a lot of simple HTML, and I do use templates for both the Plot and Notes sections, but I’ve never had problems with the HTML that can be used. (I find which HTML tags will work only through trial & error; sometimes tags I want to use don’t do anything.)

I like saving the purchase info in more detail than the fixed fields provide, like when, where, and for how much I bought something, as well as the exchange rate at the time of payment, important to me since I buy books & movies in various currencies… e.g. JPY, USD, EUR, and GBP… yet want to express the purchase & cover prices in the fixed fields in a single currency, in my case USD.

(For reference…
• In Book Collector, the cover & purchase prices appear together in the Personal tab, whereas in CLZ Books these two are split between the Details and Personal tabs. I can see benefits for both schemes but it might be nice for consistency between the apps too. I don’t use Connect so don’t know how these fields appear there.

• In both Movie Collector & CLZ Movies, the purchase price appears in the Personal tab. Oddly (for me at least, based in Japan), there seems to be no field for cover price for movies. This is obviously a Western bias since while English-language editions of movies typically have no cover price, every Japanese edition of any film (and music CDs & LPs too) that I’ve seen always has a cover price (as well as a valid sales period, indicated by an “until” date). Hence, I have to (want to) add that cover price somewhere so I put it in the Notes section, as I do with books. Having a Cover price field for movies would be nice.)

(Regarding some films with episodes (i.e. the Star Trek Original Series box sets), I’m still trying to figure out the proper or best way to input the individual discs and the box sets themselves. I’ve got other box sets to input yet, so want to nail down how to do it before proceeding with any new films & sets. What you’re seeing there now is a work in progress.)

Back to the issue at hand here, the lines in the movies’ Notes section with the 1st-position em dashes that change to hyphens don’t use any HTML tags around the em dashes themselves, but I’ll try copying some exact text from a book in Book Collector to an entry in Movie Collector (or from CLZ Books to CLZ Movies) and see what happens after syncing both ways. Something is causing it to happen, so I just need to figure out what that is now.

7

Thanks for explaining. It sounds like a lot of work taking note/filling all that in, and since they’re not actual fields, you can’t really build totals on them, or group by them (like you would with tags, which might not also be ideal, seeing you’re cataloging a lot more data - I’d say you’re definitely a candidate to get User Defined Fields to mobile app :slight_smile: ) - but you are free to use the plot/notes that as you want of course. HTML might be causing some issues there, but I’m not 100% sure.

Book Connect and CLZ Books are the same, the cover price appears at the top, and the Purchase Price under Personal.
Indeed Book Collector has that Cover Price under “Product Details”.

I also see both to have advantages, but Book Connect and CLZ Books being the same is good. Book Collector probably won’t receive an update to make that the same though.

Yeah let’s focus on that indeed! If you do find a way to get it to reproduce (maybe even on both movie and book because the sync system should work the same), let me know and I can further investigate if I can reproduce it too.