💥 Merge authors

[ChristianGruen]

I had 2 books with the authors…

1. Márquez, Gabriel García
2. García Márquez, Gabriel

Next, I updated the author name of the first book, and I was asked if I wanted to merge it with the existing author. After pressing ok and some seconds, the authors were merged, but the app crashed. Unfortunately, the crash report has 0 bytes.

However, I could successfully open the app again, seemingly without any data loss.

I will try to reproduce this to give you more helpful info.

[tfonteyn]

use : https://github.com/tfonteyn/NeverTooManyBooks/wiki#generating-a-debug-report

there might be info in the logs

[ChristianGruen]

ntmb-debug-2025-06-28.zip

[tfonteyn]

nothing useful in the logs.

side note: all database access is transactional, so any crash will just rollback and no data should ever be lost.

As said I have very limited time this/next week. Will see what i can do.

[ChristianGruen]

As said I have very limited time this/next week. Will see what i can do.

Nu hurries at all. Thanks!

[tfonteyn]

I think I've found something... it seems changing a name from "Name, The" to "The Name" can cause a problem.
At least for a publisher for example, the result is that a book can loose the publisher altogether.
If that would happen for an author, a crash might be the result as a book is not supposed to be without an author.

A bit late now today to investigate further, but I wanted to jot a quick update.

[ChristianGruen]

Good to know. I didn’t experience it again so far.

[tfonteyn]

It certainly was an issue for Series & Publishers - which is fixed now; in next release.

I'm not entirely sure this was applicable to authors. Would you by any chance still have the ISBN's for those books? And what were the likely search-sites you used at the time ?

[ChristianGruen]

It was 9783596509812, plus a book without an ISBN that I added manually a long time ago… A tough challenge to get reproduce this, I guess.

[tfonteyn]

yes, I can't reproduce for authors at all.

For publisher (and identical for series) was just a coincidence because last night I was cleaning up my publishers a bit and actually hit that particular issue. Most of the logic which P/S uses is identical with A's.. hence my suspicions. But not identical "enough".