Ability to create custom fields and filters

[sicahjes]

What's Your Idea?

It would be brilliant to have the ability to create custom fields for the book info page. Specifically, these would:

• be set at the library level
• have the option of showing in the library as a filter.

Why Would This Be Helpful?

Use Case 1: Fiction Book Spice Levels
There is a ratings field, but these serve a different purpose. Romance fiction has 6 levels of spice (no spice, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) each with their own designated meaning (which can vary). If custom fields were possible, admin could create a spice field per their own system. This would then be visible at a glance in the record, and made available as a filter.

These are generally icons, so having them in a visible location with the ability to only show if populated
(like Goodreads ratings) would make sense.

An alternative for this use case could be to implement a spice field that can be turned on/off at the library level, with admin defined cateogories.

Use Case 2: Book/Series Classification
I currently use tags for series status, but the better use of tags is 'collections' to group books together. For informational data, it is preferable to have a dedicated field. If custom fields were possible, I could create a dropdown menu with series classic (complete, incomplete, standalone, standalone series etc).

Example mockup (just an idea).

Want to Help Out?

I'm happy to help test and give feedback

Have You Considered Any Alternatives? (Optional)

Tags could theoretically achieve this, to an extent. However, for sometimes it would be useful for this data to be captured in its own field so that users could see this at a glance, always looking to the same place (tag order can vary), and then filter books according to the field category in the library view.

For the specific case of spice levels, there is a ratings field but they operate differently.

Before Submitting

• I've searched existing issues and confirmed this feature hasn't been requested yet

[QueenOfRavens]

Calibre also handles this wonderfully, however keeping everything on one page when editing would be a nice upgrade.

[obviouslyallie]

I like this and I do think its common coming from Calibre. My question would be sorting and what happens if someone has a number of custom fields that overfills the field area?

[sicahjes]

I like this and I do think its common coming from Calibre. My question would be sorting and what happens if someone has a number of custom fields that overfills the field area?

What do you mean by 'overfills the field area' - as in character length?

[imnotjames]

Could different "types" of tags fulfill this better than tags do today? eg, if you could make a..

Then if the UI would make sure that spice tags are always in the same spot separate from other tags, you could sort by spice tags, filter by spice tags, etc..

[sicahjes]

I currently use tags for these fields (spice and book class/type) and it is not optimal (for me) as:

• This field is quickly getting crowded, as tags are being used to curate collections as well as capture classification data.
• Tag order is displayed based on the order each tag is entered into the field, meaning location of specific classifications are inconsistent.
• If a book has a lot of tags, the user sometimes has to scroll through the field to find specific classification tags.

For the use cases I've provided, these are valid fields with limited options to help classify books. It would be much more user friendly to have specific classification fields appear in the same location across all books (particularly if it is expected that all books in a library will have data for these fields).

[imnotjames]

Yeah - I definitely get what you mean with there being lots of tags making things confusing when they're all mixed together.

I was thinking of splitting them out based on the "type" of tag.

It could be a lot faster to define any field you could like and do so in a way that's easy to search on our side, too.

This was a very quick mock up, of course. It could be improved for sure.. but gets the idea across I think.

[aaronified]

this can be awesome, along with hierarchical tags.

[sicahjes]

Ah, I see. Apologies!

I like this idea. To make it work for more people, perhaps that line item could be called something like ‘Class/Scale’ where user defined single select sub-categories are displayed (per your logic). This way, many different types of classifications/scales could be managed based on user/library needs. I suggest single select sub-categories to help ensure consistent scaling, if possible having a place to create these in settings to then become available when editing metadata would work well. Some example use cases:

• Spice rating
• Series status (complete/ incomplete)
• Plot vs romance scale
• Cross genre scales (e.g balance between fantasy and sci-fi etc).
• Theme scales (e.g. dark themes, violence, pace/action scares etc.).
• Trigger warnings.
• Timeline/era scale.

[Flooralia]

Another use case would be fanfiction; I manage a sizeable library of them in Calibre and the custom fields show up in the Calibre server and OPDS browsers as intended.

While I prefer using Calibre for general libary management, I want to move away from the server/OPDS and switch to Grimmory completely for those purposes, which isn't possible in it's current state. None of the custom field data shows up in Grimmory at all currently, neither does the custom ID.

Also I'm just noticing that the tags were all dumped into the genre field, for some reason.

Even if I completely revamped my system in Calibre and just dumped everything in the tags field, I wouldn't be able to sort my library properly at all, since I usually go with fandom>ship(s)>series.

[Flooralia]

Since posting this I started using hierarchical tags as well, which would also be an appreciated addition.

[sydlexius]

Just throwing my two cents to this, as I currently use custom fields in Calibre using a plugin I wrote to scrape arbookfind.com for Accelerated Reader book/interest levels and AR points (think of it as an alternative to lexile scores). Having this might mean I can escape from Calibre for good! (No knock against Calibre-Web as an end-user...it's the only thing besides Calibre's robust metadata system that keeps me tied to it).

[balaustrada]

In Calibre I used to keep fields for original title, original publication and more importantly to me: word count. I would love to have this feature implemented, especially since standard page counts often get distorted by chapter breaks or font size of the physical format. Word count is more reliable for estimating read time.

[cassiosantos]

I also want to store the original title.

[coryduude]

Whatever I can do to +1 this!

I'm also coming from Calibre (Excel prior to that) and enjoy using a number of custom fields that don't work well as tags. (For example, I track where I purchase each book or first found a book to create a map of influence so to speak - so the content of a single tag would be "Bookstore, City, State, Country"; this would be and has been a nightmare in a tag).

I've spent some time on BookOrbit which has this ability but am unnerved by it being from same person behind Booklore. (A dev specific ick, not a product one.)