Plugins: how to check for existence of a field in an item

Help
1

I am modifying a plugin and I need to check for the existence of a custom tag that the plugin creates. This way I can skip tracks that have already been processed. The plugin grabs an “item” from lib.items(query). In the item it creates a tag called recording_year. I have tried:

if u’recording_year’ in item:
and
if u’recording_year’ in item.keys():

Both options do not skip already processed files. What is the proper method to check for the existence of the custom field?

2

Huh, that should do it (even the first, simpler version). Can you maybe try printing out list(item.keys()) or perhaps even item.get('recording_year') to confirm that those items don’t actually have the field?

3

You’re right, the field isn’t populated. I can open the file in a tag editor and see the tag, but according to beets it isn’t there. The plugin is here: https://github.com/phirestalker/beets-recordingdate or at least my copy of it. So if it is sucessfully adding the field to the file, why isn’t beets seeing the field?

EDIT: I did a beet update and now it is working as it should.

So, the question then becomes, how should the plugin force an update of each item in the beets database?

4

OK. I added item.store() after the item.write() and that seems to be updating that track in the database. Can you do me a huge favor and look over the plugin?

For some reason it seems to be hitting the internet even though as far as I can tell the code to skip tracks comes before the code to query the musicbrainz server.