Feature request: user pages for tracking data

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Over years of worship planning, I've been keeping lists of hymns (in Word & Excel) to consider for each lectionary reading. I've also been tracking the hymns we've used for worship. Is anyone aware of a way to integrate this data with Hymnary.org?

It would be ideal to have user pages that make the site into a customizable database - so that, for instance, I could select a text or tune and see all the dates when I used it in worship in a given setting. It would also be helpful to be able to create my own lists of hymns by theme, scripture, or lectionary.

(I asked this question in the User Room but got no response, so am trying here.)


Comments

I really need this feature. My primary hymn planning tools are The Hymnary and a custom database of hymn metadata that I developed a decade ago that in cludes some data that The Hymnary lacks, but only contains the half a dozen hymnals I use on a regular basis. I've been looking at how to integrate the two so that my database can point to objects in The Hymnary.

The simplest way to implement custom user data would probably be to allow each user to attach to each Hymnary object (tune, text, hymnal, instance) a "tag" containing whatever text the user wanted. It could be implemented with a single database table with fields for ObjectType, ObjectID, UserID, and Text, or a bit more cleanly with one such table for each object type, omitting the ObjectType field.

Much more useful would be to allow users to create "Custom Attributes", each having a name and a data type (e.g. boolean, number, text, date/time, URL). Then for any combination of a Custom Attribute and a Hymnary object, the user could assigned a value. For example, I could create a Custom Attribute named "Last Used" whose type is date/time, which would allow me to keep track of when I last used a hymn text or tune. This would require the addition of a handful of new tables to the database.

We're considering a feature that would allow users to create a folder for an upcoming worship service and add hymns to it. After the service has taken place, it would be a record of the hymns used for that service.

Then we could add nifty features like the date a hymn was last used, reporting to licensing agencies, and favoring hymns you've used before in search results.

Not sure when or if this will happen. It would be lots of work and I'm not convinced that very many people would use it. But if hymnary.org continues to grow in usage, it will get more likely.

Harry, I'm wondering whether this feature (or one like it) is any closer to being implemented. Would volunteer labor help? I don't know any coding, but would be willing to learn. Best, John