[Resolved] Cannot remove old categories

[Redtarga]

I had a few categories out of 67 whose length was excessive. They would run into the next column. I replaced them with shorter names and, though the new categories appeared as expected the old ones are still there. I've done full syncs, checked that the old categories have zero titles, optimized the MMCM database, all to no avail.

Thank you.

[Pauven]

Sounds like a bug. I'll check on it. Thanks for reporting.

[Pauven]

I looked at the code, and a Full Sync should remove the old Categories, but you would have to exit and relaunch CMC to see the change.

Does it behave that way for you?

[Redtarga]

No, exiting CMC doesn't fix it, if by exiting you mean closing it with the top rightmost X button. I've been doing that many times a day while updating the content. I think I rebooted once or twice as well.

[Jamie]

If you did a sync before exiting, did you wait for the sync spinning icon to stop before you exit. The sync might still be doing stuff in the background while that sync icon is still spinning.

[Redtarga]

Yes. Always.

[Pauven]

So I just tested this, and I can not reproduce this issue. When doing a Smart Sync, the Category is not removed - this is to be expected. But when doing a Full Sync, the Category is removed. You don't even have to exit CMC, the unused category is immediately removed.

So this means there is not a bug.

If the Full Sync isn't working for you, then that means one of two possibilities.

1) You still have a title assigned to that category, though this seems unlikely based upon your first post.

2) You have some orphaned XML files that are no longer getting updated by MMCM or CME.

#2 is actually pretty likely. For example, I actually ran into this problem while trying to test adding and removing a custom Category today. What happened is that I had an ISO that was originally configured as an Online File, so the XML data was saved as <ISOname>.mymovies.xml and <ISOname>.mmTitle.xml. But then My Movies Collection Management decided to change this configuration to an Online Folder (MMCM is really bad to do this), and then I got mymovies.xml and mmTitle.xml files in addition to the <ISOname>.* versions.

The problem is that CMC will use the <ISOname>.mmTitle.xml or <ISOname>.mymovies.xml files if they exist, choosing them over the more generic mymovies.xml and mmTitle.xml files. But since the movie was now configured as an Online Folder, the <ISOname>.* files were now orphaned and no longer being updated with the Category changes. I could see this easily by looking in the movie folder, I saw the older <ISOname>.* files that had older dates from a few months ago, and the mmTitle.xml/mymovies.xml files that had today's date.

To figure out which titles in your collection have this problem, in CMC go ahead an filter by old Categories that you want removed, and see which titles show up. Then look in their folders and see if you don't find old XML files that are not getting updated anymore.

[Pauven]

Oh, and if you have a lot of movies that somehow got orphaned XML files like this, your best strategy might be to purge all the XML files from your media folders and re-export everything. While that will take a while, it will be mostly automatic versus you manually hunting these down.

[Redtarga]

Perhaps I misunderstood what you said, but I had mentioned in my first post that there were no titles in the old categories. I confirmed this a few minutes ago.

However, based on what you wrote I looked at titles in a small, renamed category. I found one that had an old mymovies.xml file and a recent mmtitle.xml file. I deleted the mymovies.xml file and ran CMC Data Exporter (a wonderful program, by the way) on the title.

After a full sync the old category was no longer present.

The bad news is I have to do this manually for several hundred titles (out of over 6700), but I think I can figure out a way to make this easier with Beyond Compare or Windows Search.

If you don't mind my adding an unrelated question here: I noticed that MMCM shows a total of 6627 titles but CMC shows only 4706. Of course all discs are scanned. Any thoughts?

[Pauven]

I noticed that MMCM shows a total of 6627 titles but CMC shows only 4706. Of course all discs are scanned. Any thoughts?

The # you see in CMC is the number of covers shown on the screen. This changes due to Filters being applied (i.e. Show Unwatched Only, Genres, Categories), but also TV Series and Box Sets only count as 1 cover. If you have a lot of TV Series and Box Sets, you should expect the CMC count to be lower.

If you want to see how many titles CMC is processing behind the scenes, you can open the CMC_MoviesDB.xml file, and find the title count in the top row. This will probably be slightly higher than My Movies, because each TV Series and Box Set adds 1 to the total count for this #.

The bad news is I have to do this manually for several hundred titles (out of over 6700), but I think I can figure out a way to make this easier with Beyond Compare or Windows Search.

This is why I suggested you may want to do a meta-data cleanup. CME has some cleanup tools built into it (Settings > CME Metadata Cleanup), plus MMCM has meta-data cleanup tools built into it. Then do a full export from CME. I know it seems like overkill to delete all metadata, but this way you won't have to manually try and find these hundred or so files.

As an alternate approach, you could skip the metadata cleanup and just do the full export from CME. Then do a file search for *.xml where the date is older than today, and those should be the orphaned files.