Quoting mediadogg:

Quote:
Mithi, thanks for showing how to use BulkEdit. I have fixed the XML import of Cast/Crew and I could make that available soon, if it will still be useful for this project - but I think you guys are beyond that point, right?

As far as LenG's code, that was the reason I added Visual Basic / C# scripting to BE. It requires some patience and technical expertise, but he should be able to execute various logic, although perhaps not quite as complex as he shows.

@LenG - with your expertise, you might want to request access to the Plugin Developer's Forum. Even if you don't publish them, you could then write scripts to do what you need, and perhaps lend your expertise to the Developer community - sometimes we discuss coding issues and share techniques.

For example, I never even heard if "stable sorting." But I might be able to do it with a little help .. 

Personally I would still like to get hold of the fixed version.  The learning curve would be far less severe - most of my programming has been done under linux so Visual Basic and C# are not languages with which I have any familiarity or expertise.  Thinking about it, I have almost zero experience progamming for windows.  When I want to do something I tend to fire up a linux shell (cygwin) and use shell commands for simpler stuff or python for anything more heavyweight.  However, I will look at the Plugin Developer's Forum - it might be an interesting place to lurk and I might have a few useful suggestions.

As for stable sort, it is a fairly simple concept.  If your sort key is only part of the record then there are multiple valid outputs.  The trivial example is a pack of cards - sort them numerically and the order of the suits is indeterminate.  A stable sort would guarantee that for each numeric value the order of suits before and after the operation is preserved.  Many simple (and comparatively inefficient) sorts are intrinsically stable but many computer languages default to the quicksort algorithm, which is generally not stable although I believe there are stable variants.  The wiki page on sorts specifies stability for common algorithms and for a number I've never heard of.

By the way, I notice that the XML import within bulk edit will not process xml generated by the one-file-per-profile option in DVDProfiler.  Am I right in thinking that this is because it lacks the <collection></collection> tags?  I ask because it is likely to be easier to write scripts which work on single-profile files (no need to find the beginning and end of the profile) and if the collection tag is the only problem I can easily fake that out.