A journey in building a Calibre Windows 8/WinRT app, with a SQLite fun too...

Timdams's Blog - Writing a Calibre frontend for Windows8/WinRT using ‘SQLite for WinRT’

While developing a Windows Store frontend application for the Calibre ebookmanager, I’m hitting several bumps along the road. In this post I’ll explain some of the bumps and how I’ve tried to tackle them.

Basically they can be summarized as follows:

• How to access a Sqlite database in a WinRT application
• Circumvent file access limitation of SQLIte for WinRT
• Load cover files of each book
• Create incremental-loading Gridview using ISupportIncrementalLoading

Calibre is a great open source and free to use ebookmanager. It allows me to manage my ever-growing ebook-library and it supports lots of ebook-filetypes, including the ability to convert between the types.

My goal is to write a simple Windows Store application that acts as a frontend for the Calibre database. It will show my library in a visual appealing manner (aka TDPFAM, “The-design-principle-formerly-known-as-Metro”) and allow the user to rapidly query his database from anywhere in windows. At least that’s the idea. We’ll see where we end up (check here for a little video demonstrating the application I’m building).

Future follow ups on this project might be found here on the Calibre developer forum.

...

Getting SQLite for Windows Runtime

The Calibre program stores all its information inside the “metadata.db” file, located in the rootfolder of the books library. his file is a simple SQLite-database, so we’ll need to get the “SQLIte for Windows RT” extension. I’ll discuss the database and folder layout later on when we’ll actually need to access it.

...

Sqlite-net

Sqlite-net allows a more programmer-friendly way of accessing a Sqlite database, including the ability to query your db using linq. It can be found on github here. However, it is also available through NuGet ...

Get read-rights in calibre books database folder and load metadata.db

File access for WinRT applications is pretty tight. Basically your application only has full access to the app’s local folder. If you need access to other locations, you will need permission from the user. Because we need access to the Calibre  database folder and all subfolders, which can be situated anywhere on the computer and/or network, we will use the FolderPicker and immediately store the chosen folder to the StorageApplicationPermissions.FutureAccessList ...

Load book information from database

A Calibre library has a perfect straightforward layout. Basically there’s a root folder in which the metadata.db database is situated. This sqlite db contains all the books (meta)data, including the path where the actual book is situated on the file system...

Load cover images

The nice thing of the FutureAccessList is that we not only can access the folder itself, but also all folders underneath it. Since each cover image of a book (if there is one) is located in the same folder as the bookfiles, we can simply access them without any extra hassle....

Incremental loading (experimental)

Just for fun and experimenting I’ve taken a look to how the new WinRT GridView is supporting incremental loading. Since most Calibre libraries contains several hundreds or thousands of books, it might be overkill (and a big power drain) if we’d tried to load in the book information, especially the coverfiles, all at once. If the itemsource of a GridView implements ISupportIncrementalLoading, the GridView will be able to load in new data when it’s needed. ..."

I thought this a cool post in how it show him taking his personal interest and using that as a drive to get working on a Windows 8 app. And while I'm  a GoodReads guy, I still thought this post very interesting and useful. I mean I'm going to building a Win 8 app one of these days (no, really... um... really...) and I'd much rather learn from those who have gone before.