Movie Database - Import My Own Data?

[ckcomm]

I have a bunch of home movies I'd like to catalog and watch using My Videos. I have data about them in Excel (and I've also ported it to Access). I'm hoping to import this data into the "VideoDatabasev5.db3" database.

I have slavishly conformed to the table structure of this database with my data (after browsing the data that MediaPortal itself adds when doing an IMDB scan).

I then import my data using a third party solution, the SQLite Data Wizard from SQL Maestro (which seems to have a problem with Excel data sources, so I have to convert my Excel data to an Access database first).

I do the import into a blank database (which I create using the "Reset Database" command from MediaPortal Setup). When I browse the tables with the SQLite Database Browser, the new data is there, and looks good.

But when I run MediaPortal, none of these entries appear when I choose to View "by Title". When I view "by Share", the files appear - but as far as I can tell, "by Title" populates its list based on the database contents and "by Share" populates its list based on the contents of a directory.

So it seems that something is preventing MediaPortal from considering these additions to be valid records, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. When I add records manually using the SQLite Database Browser, they seem to be recognized by MediaPortal (even though they look identical to the ones that are imported) - so I'm stumped.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[mbuzina]

Did you double check that your foreign keys are setup right? The selects from mp are usually grabbing data from more than one table (don't know for movies for sure). So make sure your genre, actors, directories / file tables are fille neatly as well.

Otherwise, attach a copy of a loaded db & I can have a look as well.

[ckcomm]

OK, here's a copy of the database with 10 movies loaded (along with 10 dummy actors, 1 genre, 1 path, etc.).

None of the titles appears when I browse by anything other than "by Share" (which doesn't use the database data, as far as I can tell). In case it's important, the video files referenced in the database actually do exist in this location on my computer.

mbuzina, please disregard my private message asking how to attach a file and get it to you. I eventually figured it out (and I added a .txt extension so the file would be accepted). Sorry to bother you with that.

If you have a chance to take a look at this, I'd be very grateful. I'm really puzzled about why these records are invalid.

[mbuzina]

I found your problem.

In the table movieinfo you left the iYear field empty. This value is then converted to a number, which fails, because numbers are not nullable (in C#). So, either enter the real year or do as I did, enter 0 and it will work.

P.S.: Tip for next time: Check your log files, it stated pretty clearly that a String could not be converted to a Number.

[ckcomm]

Makes perfect sense - I'll give it another try. Thanks so much for your help! I didn't think to look at the logs for this type of issue, so thanks for the tip too.