Curious indexFormat Behaviour

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(13-04-2018 11:20)simoncn Wrote:  Have you tried doing the following:

Title.displayFormat={$shortcomposer^^: ^$work^^: ^$movementnumber^^. ^$titletag}

Does this produce extra spaces? If so, where are they?

I think it's important to first understand the logic behind my tagging. And we know everyone has their own way...

TITLETAG is an alias for TITLE to avoid substituting the filename for empty TITLEs, thanks to your prior tip, Simon.

SHORTCOMPOSER may or may not be set.

WORK may or may not be set. It may be set without MOVEMENT and MOVEMENTNUMBER being set.

MOVEMENT may or may not be set. If it is set, so will WORK and MOVEMENTNUMBER be set.

TITLETAG may or may not be set. If WORK is not set, TITLETAG must be. But both may also be set. (In some collections of music, like Mendelssohn's Songs without Words, it's hard to think of each Song as a movement, in which case I leave each Song's title in the TITLETAG field).

So the first problem with your suggested displayFormat is that because the tags for MOVEMENT, MOVEMENTNUMBER and TITLETAG are not necessarily set, there may be a hanging colon after WORK.

This is why I prefix the $movementnumber$movement item with the colon, as these tags never exist without a WORK tag also existing (you've forgotten to include $movement in this item of your displayFormat).

It seemed to me that the only way to get everything displaying using just one displayFormat was with:

Title.displayFormat={$shortcomposer^^: $work^$movementnumber$movement^: ^^. $titletag^ }

But in this case, TITLETAG is always prefixed with a space and where there only exists a TITLETAG, then Title listings don't line up on the left edge of the control point display... Or there's an extra space in something like:

Bax: Mater Ora Filium (though that is not a biggie)

To get the displayFormat just right, I wanted to put a bracket around the WORK/MOVEMENT/MOVEMENTNUMBER items to evaluate them first and then I discovered that indexFormat effectively did this for me. I don't think I'm noticing any processing overhead that the manual talks about.