Metadata Editor » KNARZwerk

Overview

The Metadata Editor is the heart of the addon and probably the part you will spend most of your time with. It is designed to make managing your metadata more convenient and add features the default library manager is missing. Since different metadata providers use very different names for their features, genres, tags etc. and also often mix stuff around, the metadata in your library can become quite messy over time. The Metadata Editor gives you the tools to clean up that mess and keep it that way.

The editor is composed of three main parts. On the left you find the filter you can use to find the metadata you are looking for. In the middle is the grid with the actual metadata and on the right you find the games, that have the selected metadata item assigned.

Filter

Search box: here you can search for metadata names. The search supports regular expressions to allow for very specific searches. Keywords like “or” or “and” are not supported, but the same can be achieved with regex.
Prefix combobox: You’ll only see this one, if you have defined prefixes in the addon settings. It contains all your prefixes and shows only items with the selected prefix then.
type check boxes: If you only want to see specific types of metadata, you can deselect the ones you want to hide here.
Hide unused items: Does what it says. Every item with a game count of 0 will be hidden.
Group matching items: This one will add grouping to the metadata grid and also hide all items, that don’t have any matches. Items will be grouped, if they have the same name with whitespaces, special characters and prefixes removed. For developers and companies typical business descriptors like “Ltd” also get filtered out. That way you can easily find duplicates like Genre: Indie and Tag: Indie etc.

Metadata grid

Here you’ll see all metadata items that meet the filter criteria you set on the left.

You can sort by each column. When holding shift while clicking on a column name, you can sort by another column while the current sort order remains. That way you can sort by Game count and inside than by name for example.
If you have defined prefixes in the addon settings, the name column will only contain the part after the prefix.
You can select more than one item by holding CTRL while clicking on individual items. If you want to select a range, click on the first item you want to select and then hold Shift while clicking on the last one. That way every item in between will be selected, too.
The grid has a context menu opened by right clicking that contains the same options as the buttons below the grid (except for “Remove unused”).
The “Game count” columns shows how many games have the metadata item assigned. Per default that includes hidden games. You can tick a checkbox in the addon settings to ignore those in the game count and game grid.

Below the grid you’ll find the following buttons:

Add new item — this button opens a dialog to add a new metadata item. It is split by type, prefix (if you defined some in the settings) and name. The type and prefix of the currently selected item in the grid will be preset.
Merge — This button is only active if you have selected at least two items in the grid. It allows you to merge the selected items into one. The item you selected first in the grid will be preset, but you can change what item they will be merged into in the merge dialog. If you tick the “Save as merge rule” checkbox in the merge dialog, the merge action will be added as a new rule to the addon settings. If a rule with the same target already exists, the items will be added to it. Those rules can then be executed when editing metadata to merge them automatically in the future.
Merge rename — Used to save the renaming of an element directly as a merge rule. Simple renaming in the grid itself does not create a rule.
Change type — with this button you can easily change the type of the selected metadata items to convert a genre into a tag for example. This one also has the option to save the action as a merge rule.
Remove — This button simply removes the selected metadata items from the database. You can decide, if you want to add the items to the “unwanted list”, so they’ll get removed automatically next time. If you always want to add items you remove here to that list, you can tick the corresponding checkbox in the settings and you won’t get asked anymore.
Remove unused — This button removes all metadata items from the six supported types, that aren’t used in a game. If you activated the checkbox in the addon settings to ignore hidden games, “unused” means not used in a game, that isn’t hidden!
Add to whitelist — Adds the selected item to the whitelist of items, that won’t be deleted (and can be hidden from the editor)

This grid simply shows the games, that have the currently selected item assigned. If you select more than one element, all games that have all the selected elements will be displayed. In this grid you can sort by multiple columns as well and also select more than one game at a time. With the Button “Remove” below the grid or in its context menu you can remove the metadata item(s) from all selected games at once. With the button “Add games” you can add more games to the selected metadata item(s) instead. If you don’t want to see all the columns the grid offers, you can simply deactivate some of them in the addon settings.

Other things to know

Saving settings

When closing the metadata editor with the “close” button it saves its width and height as well as the ticked type comboboxes and when you open the editor next time, those will be restored. It doesn’t save the position of the window, search term or the boxes for unused games and grouping of matching items, though. If you exit the window with the X button on the top right, the dimensions and checkboxes won’t be saved. That way you can close the window without resetting your default settings after changing some stuff you don’t do regularly.

Handling of companies

Keep in mind, that developers and publishers are the same field called “company” in the database and therefore will always show up for both types. If you have a developer with some games, that doesn’t have any as a publisher, it still shows up as one with 0 games, even if you removed unused items.

If you rename a company, a dialog will show up to let you decide, if you wish to also rename the equivalent developer/publisher or split them up. Merging developers and publishers however works like the other fields and it doesn’t merge both at the same time. So you could easily merge a developer into a publisher for example.