I've looked through the Contribution Rules and searched the forums for guidelines on the "Sort Title" element, with no result.

The intent is obvious, but the implementation is patchy.  For example, several of the region 4 Angel and Buffy collections use numerics for the season in the sort title, while others spell out the number. The latter will screw the order they appear in your displayed collection (Season Five will appear before Season One, etc).

Another obvious one is the use of "The" and "A" at the start of the SortTitle element.  The region 4 version of "The Thing" has the "The" (no great harm, but not quite right either).  More correctly, "The War of the Worlds" uses "War of the Worlds" for the sort title.

Presumably, the actual sort is case insensitive (evidence suggest this), though all lower case would be good insurance.

I've fixed all my collection so the discs appear in correct "season" order.  But now my metadata is out of sync with the database.  Before I get depressed by having contributions rejected, have I missed a discussion on this?  It's a rather significant topic, so I rather think I must have (forum search results not withstanding) but can't find anything.

You also have absolutely NO control over the manner in which the Online is sorted. It is sorted according to parameters set up by Invelos.

The reason for thsi is people were arguing over how things should be sorted. Even after then Intervocative, publicly said Sort=Title. It is a purely personal decision for your local as Tim noited.

Skip

Skip, I must be missing something here.  Sort Title sure appears to be used when "order by|Title|Ascending" is selected on the Collection List menu.  It is also exported in the metadata XML. Are we talking about the same thing?

Ron

Actually, the sort title is uploaded to "My Profiler" according to your local settings, so you can make the online match your local listing by changing the sort titles.

Pasta said:

Quote:
Actually, the sort title is uploaded to "My Profiler" according to your local settings, so you can make the online match your local listing by changing the sort titles.

Thanks for clearing that up.  There probably should be a contributers' guideline for SortTitle to prevent future collation errors getting chiseled into the stone tablets, but at least I'll sleep easier now and not worry about sharing my revisions to this field.

Ron

Quoting ron7:

Quote:
Pasta said:

Quote:
Actually, the sort title is uploaded to "My Profiler" according to your local settings, so you can make the online match your local listing by changing the sort titles.

Thanks for clearing that up.  There probably should be a contributers' guideline for SortTitle to prevent future collation errors getting chiseled into the stone tablets, but at least I'll sleep easier now and not worry about sharing my revisions to this field.

Ron

Unnecessary, Ron. You have total control over how your local database sorts. If you want ot group all your James Bonds together for sorting you can do that. But you cannot change it for the online, it will be sorted there by whatever parameters Invelos uses. When you download the data initially it will sort by those parameters until such time as you change it through the Personalization area.

Skip

Quoting skipnet50:

Quote:

Unnecessary, Ron. You have total control over how your local database sorts. If you want ot group all your James Bonds together for sorting you can do that. But you cannot change it for the online, it will be sorted there by whatever parameters Invelos uses. When you download the data initially it will sort by those parameters until such time as you change it through the Personalization area.

Skip

Skip,
the online database uses the sort titles that have been set locally on the PC. At least it's sorting my DVDs online using my own sort field for each dvd. You can look my collection and all the Dr Who DvDs - I set the sort title to use the story number so they appear in time sequence.