[Alexandria-list] Snart-libraries and time

[Timothy Malone]

So as it stands, smart libraries don't work correctly with Time based
data (loaned since and now date read). This is because you cannot
compare two Time entries with < or >. I have a patch that fixes that
aspect (that I'm committing right now), but I'm wondering if we should
also add some code to sanitize these values. Right now, if you have ever
had a book as loaned it retains the loaned_since field even after the
book is "returned". As far as I can tell there is no way to have the
smart-library filter on more than one data point (you can't check to see
if a book is loaned while filtering on the loaned_since entry) unless
the user chooses that explicitly. This makes the smart_library show the
user books that are not still loaned. This is especially confusing for
the user since we don't fill the loaned_since entry in the gui with a
date unless the loaned checkbox is active (even if a loaned_since value
is stored in the file, we only show it to the user if the book is
currently loaned). My initial reaction to finding this out was to look
for all the places we need to scrub this data out, but then I realized
that maybe there is some value to keeping the data around. Perhaps users
would like to be able to see when the last time a book was loaned? In
which case I guess we should actually load that data into the GUI?
Either way I think something needs to be fixed, I'm just not sure
what. :)

Tim