Library fails to update when its directory belongs to more than one Library

General Discussions
1

I discovered a bug during an experiment this weekend. My goal was to have 2 Movies Libraries and 2 TV libraries, so they’d show up separately in my UI and be able to have 2 different sorting rules applied. For example, have one Movies library that was all movies, alphabetically and one library that was all movies, sorted by date added to the library. Since I’m constantly switching between those 2 sorts, I’d hoped this would make browsing and watching easier.

However, after doing this, when new movies were added to my library, they were not being updated in Plex’s UI. I’d perform manual scans, and still, it would not be updated. So I deleted the new Libraries that I created and the UI immediately updated.

My gut tells me that there is some low-level way that the databases are being referenced and one was being updated by both libraries during a scan, but the UI/API used the other one that was not being updated. but I could be totally wrong on that; it’s just a guess.

3

Thanks for the quick response!

I would describe this as a bug in that, even though this is not an intended use, it causes a failure in the behavior of the application, without any kind of errors or warnings while doing this. The bug is that Plex Media Server completely stops updating my library.

Regarding my expected behavior: The UI for changing sorting rules is tedious, especially since when I go into the app, there are 2 modes my mind is in:

  1. I’m going to watch something new that was added, so for TV, I need to change to episodic view, then sort by recently added, then select the media to watch
  2. I’m going to watch something very specific, so I need to sort alphabetically by TV show, so I need to switch back to show view, and clear the sort.

The above are relevant for both the iOS app and the web interface to PMS.

So, I suppose this post is really a bug report and a feature request, where the feature request is for a method where I can quickly switch between 2 methods of sorting for the same library. I would imagine that there are a lot of users who would benefit from this feature, since many of my friends, when shown what I did, went and did it themselves, only to find that their libraries also failed to update.

In the meantime, I’ll try different methods of duplicating my library. my NAS supports deduplication, but I understand that it’ll need more RAM. there’s probably a better way around that with some network share hacking.