creating smart playlists

[cburgard]

I'm currently in the process of migrating my old XBMC-based playlists into Plex. However, the majority of my playlists are "smart" playlists, which xbmc saves as xml files of the following format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="songs">
    <name>Cthulhu</name>
    <match>one</match>
    <rule field="artist" operator="is">Nox Arcana</rule>
    <rule field="artist" operator="contains">Musica Cthulhiana</rule>
    <order direction="ascending">random</order>
</smartplaylist>

Looking at the interactive interface to create smart playlists in plex, it seems that there's pretty much a 1:1 mapping of the xml file to the plex smart playlist definition.

However, trying to use the smart playlist feature with plexapi to batch-convert my playlists, I have a bunch of questions:

• the creation requests a kwargs argument that should map to the categories. However, it's unclear how for example the operators (is, contains, ...) are supposed to be passed over
• the playlists created with this method are broken, that is, they just contain the entire library, and clicking on the "Edit Filters" button in the GUI doesn't actually do anything, which also makes it hard to debug/understand what exactly is going wrong here

It would be nice if the SmartPlaylist feature could be bugfixed or at the very least documented a bit better to make clear how the operators are supposed to be passed along, and to throw specific error messages when an illegal request has been made that would lead to a broken playlist.

[blacktwin]

Operators can be found here.

the playlists created with this method are broken

What method are you using? Do you have a code snippet?

[cburgard]

Thanks for the link for the operators. Here's a snippet of the code I'm using.

def parse_xsp(xsp):
    import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
    tree = ET.parse(xsp)
    root = tree.getroot()

    order = root.find("order")
    if order is not None and order.text == "random":
        random = True
    else:
        random = False
        
    return {
        "name": root.find("name").text,
        "match": root.find("match").text,
        "random": random,
        "rules": [ {"text":rule.text, "field":rule.get("field"), "operator":str(rule.get("operator")).strip()} for rule in root.findall("rule") ]
    }

def main(args):
    from plexapi.myplex import MyPlexAccount
    from plexapi.playlist import Playlist
    account = MyPlexAccount(args.account, args.password)
    plex = account.resource(args.server).connect()

    if args.upload:
        for infile in args.input:
            if infile.endswith(".xsp"):
                try:
                    xsp = parse_xsp(infile)
                    name = xsp["name"]
                    for playlist in plex.playlists():
                        if playlist.title == name:
                            print("deleting "+name)
                            playlist.delete()
                    print("attempting to create "+name)
                    playlist = Playlist.create(server=plex,title=name,section=plex.library.section("Music"),smart=True,kwargs={ rule["field"]:rule["text"] for rule in xsp["rules"]})
                except RuntimeError as err:
                    print("error in "+infile+": "+err.message)
                    continue
            else:
                print("file format not yet supported: "+infile)    

if __name__ == "__main__":
    from argparse import ArgumentParser
    parser = ArgumentParser(description="helper script to sync playlists with Plex")
    parser.add_argument("path",type=str,help="path to the music folder")
    parser.add_argument("--upload",dest="upload",action="store_true",help="upload playlists to Plex")
    parser.add_argument("--download",dest="download",action="store_true",help="download playlists missing on the local disk")
    parser.add_argument("--output",dest="output",default=".",type=str,help="folder to contain the downloaded playlists")
    parser.add_argument("--input",dest="input",nargs="+",default=[],help="playlists to be uploaded")
    parser.add_argument("--server",type=str,required=True,default=None,help="Plex server to talk to")
    parser.add_argument("--account",type=str,required=False,default=None,help="Plex account name. If not given, you will be asked to enter it.")
    parser.add_argument("--password",type=str,required=False,default=None,help="Plex account password. If not given, you will be asked to enter it.")
    args = parser.parse_args()

    if not args.account:
        args.account = input("Plex Account: ")
    if not args.password:
        import getpass
        args.password = getpass.getpass("Password for " + args.account + ": ")
    
    main(args)

[blacktwin]

Based on the XML from XBMC I'd say that the operators are not 1:1. You'd probably need to form your kwarg outside of the Playlst.create() method to make the changes to operators to work with plexapi.

[cburgard]

Yes, that's true. I've tried it with some simple replacements, now, but I still get the same behavior: "Broken" smart playlists are created that simply contain my entire music library and where clicking on the "Edit Filters" button doesn't do anything. Here's the call:

Playlist.create(server=plex,title=name,section=plexmusic,smart=True,kwargs=filters)

Where filters in this example prints to {'artist__exact': 'Nox Arcana', 'artist__contains': 'Musica Cthulhiana'}.

Am I doing something stupid here?

One thing I seem to be missing out on is how to do the boolean operation between the filters - how do I decide if I want the "and" or the "or" of all the filters that I give? (But this seems not to be the main issue at the moment, because getting this wrong would lead to the playlist being empty in this case, and not the playlist being my entire library).

[blacktwin]

No, it looks like this feature (creating a smart Playlist) is broken. We'll have to look into it.

[cburgard]

Great, thanks for confirming! If there's anything I can do to help you debug this, please let me know!