Suggestion for helpful migration when official Titles and Comic Books are moved

[Fred Slota]

Okay, it happens...  A comic title gets entered with a wrong punctuation, or the title is changed between solicitation and publication, or a particular oddball book get's entered as one thing, but later reevaluation moves it as another.  And so, new titles and issues are added to the official database, old titles and issues are deleted from the official database, and the content updater ripples these additions and attempts these subtractions, leaving many users who already entered inventory into their databases with unrecognized titles and issues.  Okay, yes, we have the report of unrecognized titles and issues to help us find the orphans, but it's then a process of finding each new title, verifying each matching issue, and then transcribing your quantities, custom fields, grading notes and possibly other information.

 

Suggestion - add a numeric Migration field.  Each migrated old and new issue will have a unique Migration number assigned to it, negative for the old and positive for the new..  When the updater tries to delete an old issue, if you have inventory and the updater can't delete the issue, then the negative Migration number is added to that issue's Migration field.  The software can now add a feature to search the database for negative Migration numbers and their matching positive Migration numbers.  This could be used to generate a list or report that shows which old issues you have and where they should be moved to.  Better still, this could be used to produce a ComicBase tool that shows these pairings, let's you review them, select from them, and automate the migration of your inventory from old entries to new entries.  And you can select which other fields to copy over with the quantity; custom fields, grading notes.  With a little behind-the-scenes work, this tool could even cross the ComicBook/Book/Magazine divide and help with the shifting of entries across those categories as well.

 

I would imagine this system would not be backfilled with historical information about older issue migrations (although that would be increasingly helpful for people who haven't reconciled their unrecognizables), but going forward I'd guess this would be very helpful.  

 

I would also suggest that this tool also open the Unrecognized Items list, for those issues that won't be supported by Migration numbers.