■ Combined author/title information for e-Books and PDF

If you have a large collection of electronic books (MOBI, EPUB, PDF etc), the system Author and Title properties are convenient and essential — unless you have all the informaton in the filename. Only problem is that these file columns don't work for ebooks, they come up blank!

If you check the recommended xplorer² plugins page, there is a plugin that provides author/title information for PDFs called PDF Property Extension. For other kinds of ebooks, you need a separate plugin. I haven't found anything that works for windows explorer, but there is a WDX (total commander) plugin that works very well called eBookInfo. Installing it is a bit clumsy but I have blogged about it in the past.

If you install these 2 plugins then you have author and title information for all kinds of ebooks in your collection. But we are not out of the woods yet. The PDF plugin is "standard" using windows Author/Title property columns, but the WDX installs its own separate columns instead (called Author.eBookInfo and Title.eBookInfo). So you'd need 4 columns in xplorer² detailed mode to see all the information you need, at a colosal waste of space!

Enter programmable column, a unique feature of xplorer² ultimate edition. A simple operation you can do is combine individual columns into a single "super property", creating a formula that adds 2 or more file properties. For example the expression:
${Title} + " " + ${Authors}
combines the 2 text properties title and author (notice we added a space inbetween them. This in itself isn't much help for our objective, but we can use the IF() statement and check whether plain author exists, and if it doesn't use the WDX properties instead, as such:


if( ${Title}, ${Title}+" ("+${Authors}+")", ${Title.eBookInfo}+" ("+${Author.eBookInfo}+")" )

If you are the type of person that wants to understand everything, this IF tests if the Title property exists then combines title/author from the PDF plugin, otherwise it tries to use the WDX (.eBookInfo) properties for the same task. Obviousle the latter pack could be empty as well which will result in an empty column. Use Customize > Programmable > Add new menu command to add the above definition, and you can replace 4 individual columns with just the one! See this picture:

combined book information

The snag is that programmable column turns all text in lowercase