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MatPlus.Net Forum General How to best catalogue one's own compositions?
 
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(1) Posted by Andrew Buchanan [Sunday, Dec 6, 2020 09:47]

How to best catalogue one's own compositions?


Hi folks,

Well my hat's off to Dropbox! On 27-Nov I subtly but pervasively corrupted the spreadsheet in which I summarize much of the composition activity over the last 20 years, but I only discovered this today. Fortunately, Dropbox keeps detailed backups, and I was able to track the bad version, and go back to the previous safe version taken on 26-Nov. 3 PDB problems to add back, and a few other notes about unpublished/unpublishable versions that possibly I will remember or stumble upon. It could have been a lot worse.

This spreadsheet though, it's a bit of a mess. I have finished my work for the year, so maybe there's a chance to reorganize the records (618 rows currently, each containing 0-20 problems). Spreadsheets are pretty good, but maybe not the best. They are easy to update: copy & edit rows as necessary, and have powerful reporting capabilities. But the spreadsheet doesn't contain the problems themselves, which are distributed in a hierarchical file structure. User-defined tags would be much better - in a hierarchy I must decide: will I have PGs/homebase/fairy or fairy/PGs/homebase or homebase/PGs/fairy etc? Argh.

So I'm wondering if I should move to some newer technology to catalogue the problems. Maybe I should store my oeuvre (published/unpublished/unpublishable) in a private catalogue in one of the major tools? (First I want to say that all three of the databases are great, and I am extremely grateful to the developers: Dmitri, Gerd & Christian, together with their small armies of editors.) I know I can store the problems themselves in Olive, which I increasingly like. However, Olive/yacpdb doesn't have the superb search capabilities of PDB's Overview. PDB has a big problem that there is no API to allow scaled text input/output. No-one can compare to WinChloe in the breadth of compositions captured: so organized. However, for a personal portfolio, I am not sure. I have had a number of "accidents" with WinChloe databases which have left me requiring to revert to prior versions. And the reporting is not as loose as I would like: to some extent I suspect I am still ignorant of many of the features of WinChloe.

However: what do others do to catalogue the published, the unpublished & the unpublishable? Any solutions? Any essential ideas?

Love and thanks,
Andrew
 
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(2) Posted by shankar ram [Thursday, Dec 10, 2020 10:38]

I currently use WinChloe. It does have that file corruption issue sometimes. I take backups. You can do the same, either manually or through a script - which runs eveytime WinChloe starts and copies specified databases under a new name.

Years ago, I used Microsoft Access, with 1echecs font to build diagrams. It had several text fields to capture other details like source, dates, piece counts, stipulations, fairy elements, solution and comments.This worked satisfactorily, though, of course it couldn't solve.
 
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(3) Posted by Paz Einat [Thursday, Dec 10, 2020 10:54]

I am using Fancy to catalogue my problems. Olive can also be used. No search possibilities, but Fancy files can be opened on MSWord and searched on that.
 
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MatPlus.Net Forum General How to best catalogue one's own compositions?