Finally! Smart Content Sorting
DSGN Overlord
Posts: 38
I've been fighting with Smart Content for about a year now. If you've got a decent sized library you know exactly what I mean. It files everything by what a file is instead of what product it came from, so one hair product ends up scattered across Materials, Figures, Presets, Shaping and somehow Render Settings too. Open any of those and you're scrolling forever past stuff that's got nothing to do with what you were looking for. I finally got sick enough of it to do something about it.
So I built a plugin that lets me drag a product card onto whatever category I want and just drop it there. The product gets its own folder, and the sections the vendor already split it into get rebuilt underneath it. It also pulls the product out of all the other places it'd been scattered, including the ones the vendor put it in. One drag and it's in one place with its own stuff organised inside. I can grab a few products at once and drop 'em together, and the tree stays open instead of collapsing on me every time.
The other half of it is that I can delete things now. Right click any product in Smart Content and it's gone, properly gone, not hidden and not sitting there as an empty card waiting to come back. Duplicates, broken leftovers, stuff I'll never use again, all of it clears out from inside the panel itself. No hunting through Content Library, no Content DB Editor, no rewriting metadata by hand and hoping it took. Smart Content is finally something you can actually edit instead of just look at.
The difference day to day is that the structure's mine now instead of DAZ anymore in the Smart Content. I've made a top level category for each generation, figures under that, and each character inheriting it's own material, poses, shaping and even it's own hair. Click a character and everything for her's right there and nothing else is. No digging through six categories to find four files that belong together.
Took me an afternoon to redo years of mess over over 2000 products and it actually feels like a library now. One more day and I'm finally done with the DEFAULT library.
FINALLY!
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Comments
Wait, are you saying the plugin lets you actually, freely edit Smart content categorization, without the darn orphan files and all that? If so, when may I give you my money???
I see a major problem here.
If that doesn't also update the "Installed" list in DIM or Connect, people are going to have a massive list of content that shows as installed, but isn't really there.
Personally, I don't use "Smart content" because it's kind of useless, due to all the content i have that doesn't a metadata file at all, and i can consistently break the database and lose all that organization work.
Folder and file level organization, and the only worry i have, is if the drive crashes.
See below!
Fair worry, but it's not deleting anything off your drive. It only removes the entry from the Smart Content database. The files are still sitting there, so DIM and Connect are still right when they say it's installed. Reinstall or re-import the metadata and the card comes back.
I'm not touching DIM or Connect at all, on purpose. That's exactly how you end up with a wrecked library.
And on breaking the database, yeah, same fear, it's why I put off doing this for a year. Every change writes an undo file first so I can put it back.
If folder level works for you though, stick with it. This is for people who want Smart Content to actually work.
Yeah, that’s exactly what it does. Drag a product card onto any category and that’s where it goes, with its own folder and its sections underneath.
It clears it out of everywhere else at the same time, the vendor’s assignments included. And right click gives you a delete that actually deletes, so the empty leftover cards go too.
The orphan stuff was most of the battle honestly. Blank entries with no file behind them were quietly dragging whole products into categories I’d never touched. Those get skipped now and I can clear the ones already in there.
Quick video preview if you want to see: https://streamable.com/jliu6b
Isn't most of that just redoing what the Products tab of Smart Content already does?
Not quite. The Products tab shows you what's inside a product, sure, but it won't let you build your own tree and just move the thing into it.
Categorizing from there only ever adds. Everything it was already tagged with stays, vendor stuff included, so you tick a bunch of boxes and the product is still sitting in all six places it was before.
Mine clears the old ones out as part of the move and sets the product up in one spot with its own sections underneath.
Also multi-select drag, and a delete that actually gets rid of the record. Products tab doesn't do either.
Ok, so now, you'll have a bunch of junk installed, but it won't show in SM?
That's not going to cause any problems for the average user./s
I think we're talking past each other. I'm not deleting working products out of SM and leaving the files orphaned.
The records I'm removing are already broken. Entries pointing at files that aren't on the drive anymore, and duplicate copies of products that already have a proper record sitting right next to them. Deleting one of those doesn't hide anything, the real card is still there. It just gets rid of the ghost.
Nothing installed and working disappears from SM. That'd be a stupid feature and I wouldn't use it either.
Some of the categories you're speaking about, you're not supposed to open them without an item selected and 'Filter by context' active.
A prime example is the Materials category: to use your hair exemple, I'm only going there with an hair selected and Filter by context active and outside of the situation where I was looking at the Surface tab (which will screw filter by context, especially when using the Files tab), I'll only saw one product, the hair I selected:
Why would you remove Categories (which is what you seems to want to do)? Without them, Smart Content loses a big chunk of its capabilities and some products will be unusable in Smart Content (some have hundreds of files…).
Some products in Lost and Found are here only because there is one file missing a category (an easy mistake to do considering that until DS 6, the Content DB Editor didn't offered an easy way to see which file missed a category). I don't have the poses products you used in your video, so I'll keep using the same hair as an example:
In the end, either I'm not understanding what you want to achieve or I did and I don't get the appeal at all: I prefer to take the time to create or fix the metadata instead of putting one product into only one category.
The way I understand it, you don't HAVE to put everything into just one category for one, you can set the categories up any way you want - and especially, you can take stuff OUT of categories where you don't want it to show. For instance, I only want actual figure poses to show up in 'poses', not all those annoying material settings for clothes and such as well. So if I get this right, I will be able to clear my 'poses' category of all those unwanted entries.
About uninstalling files and then DIM not knowing about it, I wouldn't much like this either, the cool thing about DIM is exactly that it shows you what's installed and gets rid of stuff quickly (except the annoying orphans of course ;-)), and you don't have to hunt around for related files. So it would be extremely nice if there could be a way to make DIM aware of at least the deletion of products. But if that's just too risky, I'll still take the ability to move files around freely anytime! For deleting, I'd then stick with the tried-and-tested, albeit tedious, delete-reset database-reimport user meta data process.
I took some time to think about it while walking, then once back home, by watching the full video and I now know that didn't understand what was done.
Still not sure I understand everything, but using what's seems to be done is moving everything under a new sub-category named after the product and reproducing inside the sub-categories from the original organisation.
To re-use the example of the hair, it's currently in Hair/Long and if I get what is done correctly this time, after using the plugin, it would now be under /Hair/dForce Lanah Hair for Genesis 9/Long, its mat presets would now be under /Hair/dForce Lanah Hair for Genesis 9/Materials/ instead of Materials/
And I still don't get the usefulness of this change, so maybe I'm still missing something.
Materials presets should not appear inside the Poses category (in SC Files tab), except if they were miscategorized (I don't remember seeing this problem before, so must be rare) while a product with both poses and materials presets (typical case: footwear) will appear inside the Poses category in SC Products tab.
I'm not removing categories. I'm making my own and moving products into them. The category system's still there, it's just organised the way I want instead of the way it shipped.
And nothing I'm doing touches compatibility or content type. The plugin only changes which categories a file sits in. So whatever Filter by Context runs on, it's untouched.
On the workflow thing, that's the bit I'd push back on. Filter by Context only helps when something's already in the scene.
Half the time I'm browsing before anything's loaded, just looking for a hair or a makeup set I bought a year ago. That's where the default tree falls apart, and "select an item first" isn't an answer when there's no item yet.
Lastly, I think we actually want the same thing. You fix the metadata so a product sits where it should. So do I.
The difference is you're doing it a file at a time in the DB Editor and I'm dragging the card. Same result, one takes an evening and the other takes a second.
Yeah, you've got it exactly right. The poses thing is the perfect example, that's the same complaint I had with Materials. You can pull stuff out of a category without touching anything else, so Poses ends up with actual poses in it.
On DIM, I think I explained this badly earlier. The delete doesn't uninstall anything. No files leave your drive. It only removes the entry from the Smart Content database, so DIM's still telling you the truth when it says the product is installed, because it is. Nothing to make DIM aware of.
If you want a product actually gone, you still uninstall it in DIM like always, and that's the right tool for it. Mine's for the ghost entries, the duplicates and the cards pointing at files that aren't there. You don't need the delete-reset-reimport dance for those anymore.
Yeah cool, I'm in.