Playlists won't display in BigBox "Playlist view"

[Fursphere]

I think I have this figured out, but I don't understand why.

I've been trying to get one of the included playlists to display in the BB "playlists" view.   "Arcade SNK Neo Geo MVS"  (one that comes with the default Launchbox install)

No matter what I did, it would never show in BB.  I originally assumed it had something to do with the parent catagory relationship - but no matter what I changed nothing worked.  

Finally I decided to go XML hacking, and found this to be the solution:

Quote

 <IsAutogenerated>false</IsAutogenerated>

If that's set to 'true', it'll never show in BigBox.  Setting it to 'false' solves the issue.

Is there a specific reason for this?

[C-Beats]

That's been a thing for as long as I've been around. I think it's largely because most of the events that create playlists create a PRETTY large number of them with names that aren't always pretty. There were concerns it'd bloat that view with playlist names that made knowing what you were looking at pretty difficult. I'm referring to things like auto-generated genre child playlists. Due to this I think the logic was to hide them so only the ones you manually created yourself were shown and not lost in the sea of the other stuff.

[Fursphere]

I'd accept this, but they do show up just fine in the 'Platform Categories" view by default.    (Platform Categories is a whole different subject...)

[Fursphere]

There doesn't appear to be a way to 'un-hide' them from BB in the LB GUI, or any indication that they're hidden at all.  (unless I missed something???)

Maybe that's the 'ask' here.   Update the LB GUI to indicate what's going on.

I mean, there is a setting for "Hide in BigBox" that could be used to accomplish this (checked by default in this case). 

Edited yesterday at 05:38 PM by Fursphere

[C-Beats]

Yeah, this solution predates all of these features and may need a revisit at some point. Ideally as we moved towards new solutions on other fronts we will likely move away from some of the sidebar systems in place as they tend to trip over themselves a lot. We have a lot of idea's fleshed out for future projects but it's kind of hard to inject them into LB currently because it'd be a pretty drastic change from the normal. Tagging @faeran so he can mull over what the best course of action is in the more immediate future.

[Fursphere]

Not sure how much work it would be, but one path could be to update the LB installer / updater to ask the question:

Include Pre-made playlists?  Yes/No  (default yes)

if 'yes'

Display pre-made players in BigBox by default? yes/no  (default no)

if 'no', check "hide in bigbox" checkbox on each playlist by default

And then maybe if the original ones have been modified, rename them or move them to backups?