More ES enhancements: Persisting and editing of folder metadata - please test

[Lolonois]

Seems ES is getting ready for its 10th anniversary (1.0.2 released in June 2014, Aloshi bootstrapped the work in July 2012) esp. with pjft's Random Collection feature. :)

There is also the editing option for folders added with PR 841 [1], which is merged already. If you are keen on testing and/or use folders for organizing your ROMs already please vet it. The possibility for folder "decoration/skinning" is part of the gamelist de-facto standard [2].

If you are in a Systemview and have a folder selected, do press Options and select Edit this folder's metadata. Make changes and save it. These changes should be persisted in between ES starts.

With no editing you get a folder represented like this, note that almost every metadata is blank, except for the "hardwired" texts from the theme (Players:) in this case

:

---

If you edit the metadata you can add data to almost all properties as for a game, including a screenshot/video:

---

This displays the edit dialog for a folder:

If you don't do any metadata edit the display name in ES will be the same as the directory on filesystem and all other metadata is kept blank (this behaviour has not changed), but before this PR these folder entries have been added "on-the-fly", during gamelist parsing and have not been persisted.

Editing/persisting game metadata should have no regression by this change.

Thanks for (testing)-feedback on this.

[1] https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/pull/841
[2] https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/blob/master/GAMELISTS.md#folder

[abj]

Thank you, very nice feature!!.
I tested it and it's working very well. I can create nice collections with this.

One question, if i want to backup the metadata for the folders, what files i have to save? Thanks

Just a note for someone who want to test it. Install emulationstatiov-dev from source.

[Lolonois]

@abj The info you enter goes to/comes from the gamelist.xml file of each system. The media files I would keep away from the folders Skyscraper or other scrapers do use in general. E.g. do not put folder screenshots aso. into ~/RetroPie/roms/<system>/media/ which is the default for Skyscraper.

Heads up: Be informed that if you use Skyscraper that only the recent version (3.10.0) keeps your folder information in the gamelists, earlier versions did not keep the <folder/> elements in a gamelist.xml file.