There must be an easier way to do this!

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Clifford Kvidahl | Forum Activity | Replied: Wed, Aug 7 2013 1:31 PM

Ronald,

This may not be what you were asking, but maybe if you check your order history you could get a better picture at what you own, assuming you purchased them while they were still in collections. I hope this helps.

Cliff

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William Gabriel | Forum Activity | Replied: Thu, Aug 8 2013 6:59 AM

I'm trying to find a way to help out (would you be able to run a perl script on your computer*?), but I'm having some issues at the moment. I'm only able to locate 1115 of the 1537 in my catalog database at the moment. Once I can find the rest (anyone know of an easy way?), I can write a little program to help people identify which they're still missing.

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William Gabriel | Forum Activity | Replied: Thu, Aug 8 2013 9:42 AM

Well, I was able to locate 1,471 Classic Commentary titles. I believe that [most of] the difference is due to the way some volumes get bundled. For instance, Calvin's Commentaries count as 46 volumes on the Product page, but it's actually 19 volumes in my library (e.g. Psalms is 5 volumes in 1). I don't know if this effect makes up for the 66 volume difference, but I basically found all the Classic Commentary titles by tagging them in my library after going through the collections on the Product page.

If you have a Mac, the attached Perl script should simply run without a problem. If you have Windows, you will need to install Perl. You can do that relatively easily from ActiveState: http://www.activestate.com/activeperl.

If your Logos user data is simply in the default install location, this script will print out the volumes you're missing from the Bundle when run. If it's not there, then you'll see some type of error. Run the perl script with the option "perl check_cccb.pl -db=/full/path/to/the/logos/catalog.db". I reasonably try to find it in the script, but I'm sure it won't work for everyone.

Hopefully this works out for anyone who wants to see what they're missing. The file is "open source" so you can double check the code to make sure I'm not doing anything destructive to your computer. 

Bill

7558.check_cccb.pl.zip

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Ronald Quick | Forum Activity | Replied: Thu, Aug 8 2013 2:07 PM

Thanks for the replies.

Before I could try the ideas suggested here I received an email from Logos listing all the resources that would be "new to me".

Thanks Logos for following up and giving me a list to look at.  It was very helpful!

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William Gabriel | Forum Activity | Replied: Sat, Aug 31 2013 8:42 AM

Todd Beall:

Hi Bill,

I figured out how to run the script, and generated a text file. Is there any way to sort the file according to author, or am I out of luck there? (not sure if somehow I can convert it to excel spreadsheet form).

Thanks so much!

Todd

You probably could convert the output to excel format (split columns on the square bracket characters). But here's an updated version that fixes a possible database file path issue for some people (newer users of Logos), it's slightly smaller (I had a redundant column in my data), and it allows you to sort on author. Run the new program this way: perl check_cccb.pl -sort=author

0601.check_cccb.pl.zip

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William Gabriel | Forum Activity | Replied: Sun, Sep 1 2013 3:54 PM

Todd Beall:

Thanks so much! As a former computer programmer (back in the 1960's and 70's!) I am curious how you did this. I never heard of perl before your mention of it--what exactly is it? I would love to be able to manipulate the data in this way.

Still undecided about the classic commentaries, as the upgrade is still quite expensive for me!

Thanks again!

Todd

Perl is a bad habit of a programming language.  It's really easy to whip something up, but because it's so loosey-goosey with the syntax, it can make it terribly difficult to grow or maintain a program. I like it for file & database access and string manipulation.

There's a lot of magic in perl (until you know the rules). For instance, there's a variable called $_ that's the implicit variable that many functions will operate on if you don't specify a variable. Take a look at this code:

open CSV, "</path/to/the.csv";

while(<CSV>){

chomp;

@cols = split /,/;

print $cols[$#cols] . "\n";

}

That program will open up the csv file you specify and print out the last column of data in each row;

I used perl because it has a built in database driver for sqlite, which is what all the Logos databases use.  If you open up the example program I have in the thread, you'll see these lines. It's a piece of cake to use the DB data, then.

my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:dbname=$opt_db",'','') or die "Could not connect to Logos database at $opt_db";
my $query = "select title from records where isavailable>0";
my $sth = $dbh->prepare($query);
$sth->execute();
while (my ($title) = $sth->fetchrow_array()){
   #do something with $title from database
}
$sth->finish;
$dbh->disconnect;