Deleting a Category will spill its (playlist) children into the top level of the hierarchy

[EazyCheeze1978]

I don't know exactly how many children a category has to have for this to happen; I only know it was a LOT, for me.

I was experimenting with the Auto-generating playlists feature, and I checked the options for creating ones for the publishers, even though for performance reasons it was not recommended. I was just experimenting, and I could easily back off at any time, or so I thought.

Well, after quite a while of processing, 163 new playlists (including genre, play mode and publishers)! Wow. Yeah, I could see how having so many would be a damper on performance, but I figured that LaunchBox is built so well, it could take it! Well, unfortunately the metadata for my chosen test platform for the playlists is uneven regarding publisher names, so for some publishers I got multiple playlists. This was a bit intrusive for my tastes, at least until I went in to change the publisher strings manually, so I chose to delete the Publishers sub-category which was conveniently created.

Well, upon doing that, all the Publisher playlists were not deleted as well, but spilled out into the top level of the hierarchy along with the Arcade, Console, Computer and Handheld categories! That was a little disconcerting.

Fortunately, the workaround, though time-consuming, was effective: close LaunchBox, go into the Data/Playlists directory and select manually and delete all the publisher playlists that were created. Restart LaunchBox, and I now see only the main categories on top and the remaining playlists that I auto-generated for that platform in their place.

Everything's back to normal now, but it was a weird situation for a bit. Still, I consider it a major bug that this exists. I will, for the time being, avoid deleting categories without first deleting all their children.

I would like to suggest, in the name of both convenience/saving time when managing playlists/categories/platforms, and avoiding things like this, that an editor that allows us to select multiple child categories/playlists within a given parent category, to delete or set parentage or making multiple editing tasks in one stroke similar to selecting multiple games, be implemented. But that may be further in the future. Just a thought.