Sequential movies with non-sequential name?

[Tomkun]

is there a way of forcing movies into a certain order without renaming them? an example would be the alien quadrilogy, which goes:

alien, aliens, alien3 and alien: resurrection.

however, in "my movies", the order is:

alien, alien3, alien: resurrection, aliens.

anyone know a good method of doing this? it's not exactly important, but just for the asthetic value :)

[kraqh3d]

nope. all you can do is alter the name to make them ordered the way you want.

[Tomkun]

yeah, i thought that would be the case. nevermind, i will figure something out.

[RockDawg]

you know what would be cool, would be a sort name field in the db. i previously used meedio and along with dvd profiler (its a program that keeps track of your dvds) it would do what you wanted. dvd profiler keeps two names title name (actual displayed movie name) and sort name (a seperate name used for sorting the order of the listing).

so the title name would be aliens and the sort name would be alien 2. this way your movies would be displayed in the proper order while maintaining their correct name.

i wonder if there's a way to import an xml into the db?

[kraqh3d]

of course you can... you just need to code it up. the database schema is not complex. you just need to use the xbmc compatible sqlite.dll (since we modified the source code slightly.)

regarding the sort issue... your solution is simple enough to implement. its a nice little project to start someone off coding for xbmc. i'll even outline what needs to be done:

- modify the movieinfo database to include the new "sorttitle" field (defaulting to a null string)
- add a method to the videodatabase to allow writing the sorttitle into the database.
- make sure the other video db methods take this new field into account (getdetails, addmovie, getmovie*, etc)
- add this new field to the cimdbmovie class for use
- modify the cguiwindowvideotitle sort routine to allow sorting by this name if its not a null string
- add an option to the title view context menu to allow setting the sort name.