Series and Ordering

[hatsharpener]

I have DVDPedia and BookPedia. In both I have content that is serialized - i.e. movies with sequels or multiple books in a trilogy. I'm wondering how people setup their pedias to sort and keep these in order. If I sort Alphabetically by title or genre, it works fine for things like "Spider-Man 2" but not for things like "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe." Is there a way to use the custom fields to do this without affecting the sorting of titles that are NOT serialized?

Examples:
"Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring" (1)
"Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" (2)
"Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" (3)

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (1)
"The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" (2)
"Live, the Universe and Everything" (3)
"So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" (4)
"Mostly Harmless" (5)

etc.

Any ideas? Thanks!

[Conor]

Try the title sort field. You can turn it on in the preferences under "Fields" and "add/edit" window option. To that field you can add the following information:

"Lord of the Rings: 1"
"Lord of the Rings: 2"
"Lord of the Rings: 3"

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1"
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 2"
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 3"
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 4"

Re-sort the title column and it will take the sort title into account, and keep the movies together.

[hatsharpener]

Perfect! Thank you!

[singerman]

Try the title sort field.

Does the title sort field act as a sort key for the title, or for everything? For example, I want to order my book collection by author, series name, book number, and title. (Sorting by title last takes care of books not in series; since the series field is blank, such books come first within a single author.) If the title sort field is the only thing considered, then I'd have to go through each book and set their fields:

Tolkein, J.R.R. LOTR 1
...
Card, Orson Scott Shadow 1
...

If later I want to sort a different way, I'd have to change all the fields. My workaround was to name Custom Field 1 to "# in Series," filling that in where needed, and sorting. The documentation mentions that you can sort by multiple fields:

You can also sort by multiple columns to a depth of 6 columns. When you change column, it sub-sorts by what was last sorted so you want to click on the columns in reverse order i.e. if you want to sort your collection by Title, Author and My Rating, sort the Title column first, then Author, then My Rating; the sorting will now be My Rating, and where those are equal Author, and where those are equal Title.

Since I don't have to provide a sort key to every book in my collection, I can change the sorting (say, sorting everything by title to find one book I only remember the name of; then putting it back to Author-Series-Number-Title) quickly.

[Conor]

The sort title field is only considered for the title sort. If it contains a value it replaces that as the sort key for the title. So you can still sort your books Author-Series-Number-Title by clicking the columns in reverse order. In this case the title sort would be rarely used; a book would have to have the same author, series and book number before falling through to the title. The title sort is not needed if you have a book number field, you could leave it off; having the following fields in a book would give you your preferred sort order. The series would keep them together and the book number would sort them correctly, it would never even reach the title sorting.

Author Series Number Title
J.R.R. T... LOTR 1 .... Fellowship ...
J.R.R. T... LOTR 2 .... Two Towers
J.R.R. T... LOTR 3 .... Return ...

Your solution with the title sort including all the information would also work. It's a question of preference, and how fine grained you like your information (series and book number could be a single field). I prefer the custom fields, it does takes two more clicks to set the right sort order, but it allows more flexibility as the information is contained in separate fields that can be manipulated, sorted, exported, and changed individually.

You do have to remember that if you sort by title for a quick browse, you then have to click on number then series and finally author to get back to the original sorting.