Separate Cookbooks/collections

[MightyVi]

Wow great program i'm in the process of trying to figure out my transition over from several different collection media into your program. In the past I've used a very simple program called RegiDean it's very basic in function however one thing that I particularly liked about it was the ability to have separate recipe stores or separate cookbooks. I have ALOT of recipies broken down into collections and then sorted by type or category.

I like your organizational method better for within a specific Recipe set or collection with categories however is there a way to have multiple books/collections which would then be broken down by categories within each book/collection. Maybe even just a separate search criteria would work where you could search or display based upon a collection tag. Even being able to narrow a search by just author would be helpful though not quite as flexible in organizational possibilities.

Great program and hopefully someone can point me in the right direction and i'm just missing something I'm still exploring the use of this app and from what i've seen thus far one of if not the easiest to use and most robust Recipe programs out there.

[Harry Jennerway]

You should be able to separate recipes with categories. You can Ctrl+Click tto select multiple categories.

Searching by author, however, is a useful feature and hopefully will be added in 1.67 (Which I hope to finish/release in a few weeks).

Thanks.

[MightyVi]

Yes i see how I can separate by categories and have things in multiple categories that works great. I guess what i'm looking for would be something new all together. Perhaps i should have put this into feature requests. I'm looking for a top level way to separate groups of recipes. Say I have a personal collection of recipes that i've come up with or tweaked myself, and I've broken those out by Category like appetizers, main dish, desert, etc. however sometimes i don't want the clutter of having to look through all of the tings I have tagged as appetizers etc that are not my recipes I only want "My" appetizers, main dishes etc. to show. I suppose I could do this with another Category and use the multiple categories like you said however I have "alot" of separate collections so this method would expand my categories exponentially and clutter that list as well as making it very difficult to tag these collections as once they are imported they would go into a single collection and then need to be sorted manually.

I'll give you another example and maybe you can tell me a better way of going about what i'm trying to do. Say for instance I have 4 cookbooks/collections in separate files that are formated to be readily imported into ChickenPing 2 master chef files, a plain text, and an XML. One is my personal recipes, one is a collection of my family's favorite recipes, one is a collection of my favorite chef's, and one is a set of recipes i'm in the process of working on and perfecting. If i import all of these they will all come in and they are categorized based upon the metrics previously used in the old program. However now by pulling them all in I have one "BIG" really big single set of recipes so i'm having trouble browsing them especially when looking for specifics. Maybe i want to search for a recipe i can't quite think of the name but i know which collection it came from. If i could separate it out by collection and browse it would be alot simpler to find. Think of it like this If you've ever used OneNote, evernote, or something similar. Onenote has Notebooks we will say these are equivalent to Collections/Cookbooks, then there are Tabs these would be equivalent to Categories, and finally there are pages or in our case these would be entries/Recipes. Now browsing and sorting through this Three tiered structure is much easier then a 2 tier structure even though you are using the categories as tags and by cross tagging it makes it even easier. Follow me? If there was another layer or sort criteria just a single field would probably due where I could turn on of certain collections it would make sorting my massive collection much easier.

Maybe i'm over thinking it and should just stick to the tags/Categories, I think it's just difficult coming from having built this huge library of recipes and utilizing several approaches and programs to do different things. I think it's just simpler for me to think about my recipes as separate collections and when i put them together they are just overwhelming.

[Harry Jennerway]

I see where you're coming from. It's difficult implementing a generic, widely useful sorting and tagging system that isn't overly complex, but I will give this some though when I get free time.

Thanks for your feedback.

[MightyVi]

No worries you've done a fantastic job thus far and the more I play with it the Tagging works well Just for me not quite robust enough though my case is probably the exception most users would probably only need it for a single collection. Thanks again

[MightyVi]

Harry I was thinking on this and considered the idea of maybe separate DB's is that feasible? Having a way to keep multiple databases as separate collections? Though then it would probably be more difficult to search your entire library. Hmmm Just kicking around Ideas

[Harry Jennerway]

Possible, I may get time to implement it in a couple of months.

Thanks.

[Harry Jennerway]

Searching by author Added in ChickenPing 1.67.