I am considering adding CSV Import to the BulkEdit Plugin. It is not hard, but I'm not sure if anybody wants it in there, doesn't want it in there, doesn't care, whatever ...

So, here is a poll to give some guidance. If you want to add some words to back up and explain your response, that would be great. If I'm gonna do some work, I prefer to do stuff that will help people instead of wasting time on what they don't want or need.

Also, if you have opinions about BulkEdit (good / bad / indifferent) you can share them here or in that thread. Just looking for feedback before going any further.

There are 4 subcategories under I Want It, if you care about how it is done.

Quoting Mark Harrison:

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Anyway, if my assumptions are correct, you're probably trying to solicit information from the wrong group of users.  The people you should be asking are the people who are still off using some other program and not currently members of this site.

I hear you, but so far, every plugin I've written has been based on reading the Forums and noting requests for new features, et. I have in fact seen at least one existing user ask for this, and I was just wondering if there were more.

I also think about my own needs, but look to see if somebody else can use what I'm doing in order to motivate me to do it with better quality. For my purposes, I have a bunch of DVDs Region 2 DVDs that are not in the Profiler Database. I don't have the time, energy or expertise to submit profiles for them, but I want to track them in Profiler, use LoadDVD to play fthem from my changers, and slowly update profiles and maybe submit them as I have time.

So I built BulkEdit and XML import with the goal of being able to load/offload a bunch of data that I now store in simple text lists that will eventually be used to create manual profiles. As I told you in the PM, the import/export was oriented towards managing changes to personal information primarily, something people have been asking for in order to faciilitate changes to Location, Slots, Collection #, Notes (trailer info), etc.

When I sent you a PM to get your opinion, I was expecting to have this discussion ahead of time, to help me decide whether to go even this far. When you seemed supportive, I went ahead with the poll. So your comments are a bit of a surprise.

Quoting Mark Harrison:

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I support your idea 100%.  I just imagine that this would mainly be used by new users hoping to find an easy way to import their existing collection from some other program.  It sounds like there might be other needs for a CSV Import that I'm not aware of.  In which case this poll makes a lot more sense.

So my comments shouldn't be a surprise.  I think I'm just confused.

Thanks, but by the looks of the poll so far, it may be moot (the only "yes" vote is mine so far!). I'll give it a couple of days before pulling the plug.

Quoting mediadogg:

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Thanks, but by the looks of the poll so far, it may be moot (the only "yes" vote is mine so far!). I'll give it a couple of days before pulling the plug.

The poll may be moot, but I don't believe the plug-in is.  I'm not sure what you intend to pull the plug on, but I would hope it's not the plug-in itself.  While many existing users may not ever use it, I've seen tons of requests over the years for an import function from new users.  I've even seen people come to the site, like what they see, but end up leaving because it would be too hard to import their existing data.

Quoting Mithi:

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As for "Personal Info Only" that would cut down the possible problem with importing third party stuff, as (as far as I know) every other DVD cataloger uses data scraping from IMDB and Amazon etc.
cya, Mithi

That was the idea, and it is how my XML import works. But I was wondering if the same could be accomplished with locks. I don't understand locking and contributions very well, so if anyone has ideas, let me know. My XML import has code suppressed that would bring in the entire profile, if I can find a way to prevent the problem that you pointed out. And of course that same code can be front-ended by a CSV parser instead of an XML parser.

Appreciate all the comments. If any "Don't Do It" persons prefer to send me a PM rather than object in public, that would still allow me to know your point of view, so feel free to do that. Thanks.

@ya_shin, I think your idea is not so wierd at all. There are many styles. Some people will prefer to edit CSV (or even XML) directly. CSV/Excel view is handy and easy to use, especially if you only have one record per profile.