Need information on the calibre object model

[David Nemeskey]

Hey,

I have been using Calibre for a few days now, and although I checked the homepage and googled around a bit, I could not find information on the calibre object model. More specifically, there is only a sentence about the parameters formatter, kwargs, mi and locals passed to the template functions, and that's not really enough to use them.

For example, if I would like to extract the number of books associated with a certain author, I am stuck because such information is not available in the manual.

So please, extend the manual with information on calibre's essentials, the meaning of the parameters, etc; and even a few examples would not hurt.

[Charles Haley (cbhaley)]

Are you referring to the template functions definition preference? If so, that box has access to the source of all the built-in template functions. It is hard to imagine better examples.

As for the "object model", the best documentation available is the calibre source.

FYI: template functions operate on a book-by-book basis. General queries are not possible. The only way to do the query you described is to write SQL directly against the database.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

The template language is comprehensively documented, with
examples, here: http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/template_lang.html

At least it is as comprehensively documented as we have the patience for.
If you need more, use the source, Luke :)

Offhand, I'd say there's no easy way to do what you want via the template
language. calibre maintains all metadata in a nice, normalized, SQLite
database, use that.

 status invalid

[David Nemeskey (nemeskeyd)]

Thanks for the reply, too bad it's not possible.

However, I don't think this feature request should have been marked invalid. What I asked for was documentation not on the template language, but on the python API, which is nowhere to be found, and it would be nice to have. I understand if you don't have the time to update the manual; however, in this case the status should be changed to Won't fix instead.

On a related note (I know it should be a separate bug report), but the box does not show the code for predefined template functions, only those I created. I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 and the calibre version downloaded two days ago from the homepage.

[Charles Haley (cbhaley)]

Pushed a fix (I hope) for not seeing the source for template functions when not running from calibre source.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

All those objects your are asking for API documentation of are really trivial, with the mi object being the only exception. I've added API documentation for it to the tutorial.

[David Nemeskey (nemeskeyd)]

Thanks guys, looking forward to the next version.