Meta-data and parent/child relationships

Q & A
#1

I’m working on the custom meta-data for my stories and characters and see that you can add the character relationships as meta-data. I go ahead and do that and it work well–except for one thing.

For things like ‘spouse’ both show up. If you go to either character, their Spouse has their name on the line. But if you are using Parent/Child, then the Parent will show up in the meta-data, but the Child won’t.

Yet if I go to said Child, it mentions the Parent.

I know the words are different, but is that enough to mess with the importing? Can it be made so that both variations pop up?

Metadata should export with both sides of a relationship
#2

You can set any relationship as ‘bidirectional’ in the settings. I presume this setting is unchecked for your parent/child relationship.

image

#3

Bidirectional is only if the two relationships are the same, like Spouse and Spouse. Parent/Child would be Inverse.

#4

Well - the ‘Show inverse in inspector’ should do what you need then?

#5

No, it did not. It only shows Parent in the export to Scrivener

I suppose I could just make Parent and Child separate parts without them being linked, that would make it work.

#6

Currently we do only sync the primary relationship in a inverse relationship such as Parent/Child. This is due to the ambiguities that can arise with syncing these types of relationships, eg. when you only delete one part of the relationship in Scrivener and not the other.

I will create a ticket for our developers to look into this, and see if there can be a way that this can be implemented, as we agree it would be better if all the information could be synced across.

#7

Thank you so much, that will really help a lot!

For the situation you suggested, wouldn’t it just delete both? I assume if you delete one Sibling then the other get deleted as well, can’t the same be made for Parent/Child in terms of syncing?

#8

It’s been a few years- are there any updates about all of the info syncing in Scrivener? It makes it sort of useless in terms of syncable information if only half of it is ever there.

#9

Unfortunately no, there are no updates on this yet.

1 Like
#10

Thank you, Jess! I began working with it and realized it’s not as bad as I had hoped. Maybe we’ll get an update one day, but until then it’s alright.