Category management dialog (was "Drop Down 'Pick' List For Categories not in A-Z order")

[Oldbwl]

The Drop Down Category list order is probably in the order of creation by date at the moment - so, when typing in the selection box a search item for Categories the list appears random. There are 2 useful reason for reordering in to A-Z

1. You know where to scroll to to get your item of preference and most importantly:
2. You can see categories which are very similar in spelling which can result in totally different search results such as "Bell pepper - Green" or "Bell Pepper-Green" - An A-Z sort provides a means to see spelling errors etc. The alternative now is to Type in this Instance "B" then see every listed item to find pairs or more of categories meant to be the same scattered through the list. This is quite difficult.

[wedesoft]

The categories are ordered by number of recipes (I.e. popularity).

[Oldbwl]

OK, is there a config file where that can be altered?

[wedesoft]

I have created a branch with that change. It is not in a configuration file, so it needs rebuilding. Let me know if I should create a Windows installer or AppImage for you.

[Oldbwl]

I am a linux mint user, so will do a build from the code.

very grateful for this.

[wedesoft]

No problem. Happy to help. I guess if you don't have many recipes, sorting alphabetical is better. When you have 300000 recipes the Google approach of most frequent search term works better though, IMHO.

[Oldbwl]

Downloaded branch, been using for a week or so now, got rid of so many dupe categories with this in record time, really pleased and very grateful.

[wedesoft]

Ok, happy to hear that it is working for you :)

[wedesoft]

Hi, I have changed AnyMeal to order categories by recipe count descending first and by alphabet ascending second. So if you have lots of single recipe categories, they should now appear in alphabetical order.

[Oldbwl]

So will the following appear as shown below in example 1 or as in 2. Example 1. Cake Dessert Cakes Desert ----the latter two having single entries

Example 2 Cake Cakes Desert Dessert

I have like you in excess of 300K recipes, I have standardised the spelling of the categories to ensure all are the same major groupings, but of course with 350+ categories, I have made lots of spelling mistakes, and these are easy to catch in Example 2.

I type the first letter in the category search box and scroll down the list- - which can be very long, if all the single categories are at the end, then I am unlikely to notice the potential mistake, some are quite subtle, for example a capitalization of the word such as "Baking Powder" and "Baking powder", creates 2 categories, and I want to make them all the same - this is important when I export and import elsewhere.

Now if you created a Category edit/management page? (lol)..... I ask for too much I know. LOL!!!!

[wedesoft]

Maybe one could implement a dialogue to select multiple categories from an alphabetical list to merge into a target category entered using a combo box.