Can you be a bit more specific on what exactly you did?

All profiles live by themselves first and foremost.

But you can take any number of box sets and assign the same child profiles to them.

This often happens with re-releases of seasons or even complete series boxes that just re-pack the discs from the earlier releases.

So something like this:

Quote:

Star Trek: Season 1 (UPC: 123456789012)
- Disc 1  (DiscId: ABCD-EF12-3456-890A)

Star Trek: The Complete Series (UPC: 987654321098)
- Disc 1 (DiscId: ABCD-EF12-3456-890A)

is totally ok and not out of the norm.

Quoting mediadogg:

Quote:
then reminded myself that a given profile can have only one parent. What am I missing?

You're thinking "your local DB". In your local, one profile can only have one parent, true. This is due to the hierarchical display of the program

But in the online any number of profiles can have the same child profile assigned because it's just a bit of text in the "box set content" part of the profile.


Since the OP was talking about contribution ("submit") I assumed that this was his issue.

That was the issue where I submitted the child profiles for the parent and some were approved and some were not.  If I try and create those child profiles from scratch it tells me the disc id's are for another profile. 

Quoting DJ Doena:

Quote:

...
Theoretically, these same discs 365D-DC5E-33FB-DC4F and 4316-208E-6910-50D4 could be attached to a different box set in the Online database. But not your local. Locally one profile can only have one parent.
...

And therein lies the rub: "theoretically". But what happens when all the affected profiles (both parents and all children) get downloaded from the Online?  What does that XML look like?

Seems like the ability to create an inconsistent database view by having multiple parents in the online, that cannot be represented in the local, would not have been intended by Ken. I would call it a bug. It doesn't make sense for the online database schema to be different from the local. That would invalidate upload/download, restore from online, etc.

Quoting mediadogg:

Quote:

And therein lies the rub: "theoretically". But what happens when all the affected profiles (both parents and all children) get downloaded from the Online?

They get downloaded and attached to the first profile, then discarded for the other ones. Or last one wins. Either or, they are just attached to one profile.

You can try it out. Both of these German Babylon 5 sets 7321921739934 and 7321921228551 contain the disc F45C-2781-4F50-9D7C (Season 1, Disc 1).

If you add both of them at the same time, the child is only attached to one of them

This is getting a bit off topic, but ...

I have wondered why a child profile even has the parent info. I can't think of any functionality in DVD Profiler itself that would depend on knowing the parent of a boxset child. Everything seems to be hierarchically top-down, i.e. the parent is responsible for keeping track of the children.

In ProfilerQuery I use the presence of the parent node to detect that a profile is a boxset child. But I haven't (yet) found any use for the actual parent id. As far as I know, there is nothing in Profiler that even shows that a profile (when displayed on its own) is a boxset child.

The fact that you can't have the same child in two (or more) boxsets, is that a bug? No, I don't think so. It would be a bug if Ken thought that it would work. I don't believe he did. So, it's a limitation. The limitation stems from the fact that you can't have two profiles with the same ID, since the ID is the unique key in the database, and each entry in Profiler is its own profile. Ken could have made provisions for multiple boxsets to point to the same child profile. Only Ken knows why he didn't.

A possible work-around is to create a manual profile and copy everything from the original child profile (DVD/Copy, DVD/Paste), and add that manual profile as a child to the second boxset. The downside is, of course, that this child will never be automatically updated.

Quoting GSyren:

Quote:

...

The fact that you can't have the same child in two (or more) boxsets, is that a bug? No, I don't think so. It would be a bug if Ken thought that it would work. I don't believe he did. So, it's a limitation.
...
As far as I know, there is nothing in Profiler that even shows that a profile (when displayed on its own) is a boxset child.
...

The fact that there are two schemas in place is a bug. The limitation is not the bug, but that the limitation does not apply consistently: the local db has it, the online doesn't.

As DJ points out, Alternate IDs is a solution, created in part by Ken to solve this type of problem. You can clone a profile as many times as you want, simply by creating a unique database key, using the Alternate ID mechanism.

As far as the utility of the Parent ID, again as DJ points out, the local DB uses it as a convenient way to organize the nested display in the collections windows. I'm guessing Ken didn't get around to figuring out a clever way to indicate multiple parents visually, so the bug fell by the wayside.

Perhaps a hot key that cycles thru "Nest by first parent ..", "Nest by second parent ...", etc. would work? And then you would need an option to say whether to apply the nesting rule at the top level or all the way down. Nightmare!!!

P.S. Edited additional note. I mentioned the one (critical) place in DVD Profiler where the fact that a profile is part of a box set is shown, is in the Edit Profile, when you attempt to add a profile to a box set for which the edited profile is the parent. You will notice that the selection side bar of profiles does not include any profiles that are already children in a box set. That's what lead to my question to DJ as to how a dual Parent profile is created, which lead to his example, etc.