I am auditing my book database and have found a good number of duplicate books. This typically occurs for me when I had the book in my wishlist with one ISBN and purchased the same book with a different ISBN. The problem I have is that both entries have desirable data that I would like represented in the single remaining record, but the only way to accomplish this is to repeatedly open one record, grab the desired data, close the record, open the second record, and paste the data. This is pretty tedious, and there is some data, like date the record was created, that cannot be transferred.
Is there a way to merge the two records together, selecting which fields will be pulled into the new merged record? This is similar to merging pick lists; just one step further.
I’m afraid it is not possible to merge books in your collection. If you would have information in single value fields what would happen if both books have information? Which one would be kept? And that for all those fields, it is a bit dangerous to merge.
I would understand Genres you could make one big block of Genres and dedupe them.
What you could do is:
Find the book you had on wish list and edit it.
Remove the ISBN, and enter your NEW ISBN of the book you actually have
You may optionally remove the covers too.
Save it.
Right click the same book and click UNLINK
Right click the same book again, and click LINK to link it to the correct entry in Core with the right ISBN that you previously filled in
Right click the same book again, and use Update from Core, to download the information from your actual ISBN into that book.
Note that only empty fields will be filled in though.
It’s not optimal, but I wanted to think with you.
Could you give me an example of which exact fields, like an actual example, you want to carry over to the newly added book (coming from the old book?)
I think that, in principle, a Basic merge of two books A and B would be quite easy to implement . By Basic I mean that A is retained, and that any blank fields in A are filled in from the corresponding fields in B.
It seems that you want something far more complex, ie sometimes you use A, sometimes B, and sometimes append A values to B. This seems ridiculously difficult to code and use. Also, bear in mind that Alwin has said that there will be no more upgrades to the Windows products, so that even if the feature was implemented, it would only appear in Connect.
Depending on the complexity of your data and your skills with spreadsheets you could try the following -
1 sync your database
2 In Cloud, export your duplicates to a CSV file,
3 Load file into spreadsheet and copy/merge data, perhaps writing formulae to simplify the task, so that you finish up with the data in the way you want it.
4 Save the results as a CSV
5 In Cloud, import the CSV file
6 re-sync your database.
There will be several tidying up tasks to carry out - relinking the books to CLZ, removing the unwanted duplicates etc. And this may not work if there is data that won’t export or import properly.
I think that whatever course you take, you have a lot of work to do.
Okay, thanks for your response, AJ. I only asked because there were some similar features already in the software, and merging records is a pretty basic feature in most database driven software like Access and FileMaker Pro.
It’s a simple feature that takes the two records to be merged, displays each of the unique fields next to each other (Often in two columns), and has checkboxes or radio buttons next to each unique field. By selecting the checkbox next to one of the two options, the software is able to make a new record with those selections and delete the two original records. Some software has an option to choose which record has the most number of desired fields and defaults the checkboxes to that record.
These checkboxes would give the user the choice of what data is kept. Even if this kind of merge system never happens, you may want to consider giving the user the ability to choose which of the two pick list items being merged that they want to keep. I’ve had merged pick list items default to the unwanted data more than a few times.
To reduce the danger of merging records, you could add a step in the process, between the creation of the new record and the deletion of the old records. The step could show the user a preview of the new record to ensure they are happy with the results, and if not, the new record would be deleted and the interface would take the user back to the previous screen to correct their selections.
I’ve designed features like this using template code from online for other databases I’ve built, since no matter how hard you may try, users always find ways to enter in duplicate records, often with unique information… The hardest part of the merges was when they wanted the information from a unique field from both records. I had some luck with concatenation scripts though.
There isn’t any typical fields that I would need to merge. On some, it’s the book’s plot and genre. On others, it’s Library of Congress information.
Thanks again for taking the time to respond to my post.
Steve, considering I only have a few records like this to merge, it doesn’t make sense to go to the extent of your suggestion with CSV files. You may also want to check your tone next time you respond to someone’s post as you came across as demeaning and confrontational in your reply. Not everyone is going to be as understanding as I am today. I don’t spend much time in this forum, but I am just someone looking for a little help, not someone looking to have a fight or be made to feel like crud. Your words were very discouraging.
I was surprised to see that there will be no more updates to the Windows-based application. I wish I had known that before I paid for another year of upgrades on the Windows software. I’ve been using the app-based and Windows-based software since 2013, so I am disappointed that they have decided to take that route.
Alexander,
I was genuinely trying to be helpful. I’m sorry if I got the tone wrong.
More importantly, you need to understand that you haven’t wasted your money renwing your licence.
Alwin has written a long artice about the future of the Collectorz products, and the reason for switching, or not switching to Connect. You can find the artcle here Collector desktop vs Connect web-based
My understanding, as a User is
Windows products will be supported into the foreseeable future. They will be updated to be compatible with other producs (Core, Cloud, Connect etc) but no new features will be added
you can try Connect for a week, for free, to see if you like it
if you do like it, you can trade in your Windows subscription for a Connect subscription. Not only will you not lose any subscription days, they will throw in some extra days for free.