How are plugins identifying Favorites?

[Opus4]

A change is being considered regarding how Favorite descriptions are stored so that the list of channels a Favorite is limited to are placed at the end of the description, in order to prevent long channel lists from interfering with the visibility of other parts of the Favorite's description.

Before doing this, we would like to know if any plugins that affect Favorites are using GetFavoriteDescription() to identify Favorites , or whether GetFavoriteID() is being used.

This change would affect the description string, but not the ID. If a plugin relies on the description of a Favorite to identify it, then the plugin could be broken by this change. The description change may not be done depending on how it would affect plugins.

Thanks.

- Andy

[GKusnick]

I say go ahead and break them. The Description is meant to be human-readable descriptive text, and as such should be subject to change in response to user feedback. Any plugin that's misusing it as an invariant ID needs to be fixed. Your ability to make changes that improve the user experience should not be held hostage to possible bad plugin behavior.

However it's obviously appropriate to give plugin devs advance warning (as you're doing now) so they have a chance to fix their plugins before they get broken.

[Opus4]

And, the ID should already be used anyway, because otherwise the plugin's Favorite settings would need to be redone every time the user modifies some part of the Favorite.

- Andy

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

I say go ahead and break them. The Description is meant to be human-readable descriptive text, and as such should be subject to change in response to user feedback. Any plugin that's misusing it as an invariant ID needs to be fixed. Your ability to make changes that improve the user experience should not be held hostage to possible bad plugin behavior.

However it's obviously appropriate to give plugin devs advance warning (as you're doing now) so they have a chance to fix their plugins before they get broken.

Agreed. And FWIW, I only ever use the id to uniquely identify favourites.

[tmiranda]

I always the ID, never the description.

[Fonceur]

I also use the ID. So while you're looking at Favorites, any chance of getting some events (add/del) for the Manual recordings like there is for the Favorites?

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by Fonceur

I also use the ID. So while you're looking at Favorites, any chance of getting some events (add/del) for the Manual recordings like there is for the Favorites?

I just put something on the todo list for adding events for ManualRecords similar to Favorites. (not that I condone your threadjacking to make a feature request)

[jreichen]

I only use the id in the web ui's.

[Narflex]

Since there doesn't seem to be any opposition to this we're going to put this change in V7.1.6.

[Skirge01]

Not sure if I was the only one who submitted this as a bug, but I wanted to say thanks to SageTV for the quick attention to it.