create sermons automatically

I'm trying to move a bunch of sermons over from a very old sermon speaker site and have tried to use the create sermons automatically option. To start with I moved a folder (series) over and turned the auto sermon utility loose. Boy, was I impressed! Not only did it get them all but it also got the series right. In view of my more recent experience, I suspect that it gets the series name from the album name in the mp3 metadata (?) and not from the folder it is in. Anyway, being very encouraged, I moved over just about everything else and tried again. It got abour 30 (out of 80) right and then crashed with the error

1064 You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 's Christmas Gifts'' at line 1 SQL=SELECT id FROM ncpsy_sermon_series WHERE series_title like 'God's Christmas Gifts';

I'm guessing the issue is the apostrophe in the album title "God's Christmas Gifts". I'm going to deal with the sermons in this series manually and then turn the auto sermon loose again and see how it fares.

Further to the previous post, once the files in the "God's CHristmas gifts" series were dealt with using the auto sermon utility brought in a whole bunch more. There was an issue with a number of warnings saying that an alias was already in use. I'm going to have to go back and see what happened.

Ross wrote: 1064 You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 's Christmas Gifts'' at line 1 SQL=SELECT id FROM ncpsy_sermon_series WHERE series_title like 'God's Christmas Gifts';

I'm guessing the issue is the apostrophe in the album title "God's Christmas Gifts". I'm going to deal with the sermons in this series manually and then turn the auto sermon loose again and see how it fares.

Your guess is absolutely correct. I have now fixed this bug in my development trunk. The tags read from id3 source were not properly escaped and thus could break the SQL.
Thanks for sharing your findings!

Ross wrote: Further to the previous post, once the files in the "God's CHristmas gifts" series were dealt with using the auto sermon utility brought in a whole bunch more. There was an issue with a number of warnings saying that an alias was already in use. I'm going to have to go back and see what happened.

An alias has to be unique in the database. SermonSpeaker tries to generate an alias for you when it creates the sermons, but it usually fails if you have multiple sermons with the same title. The alias will be used in the URL of the sermon if SEF URLs are enabled.
You can just add a number to the alias to make it unique again.

I tried running the auto sermon again and got the same errors. e.g.

Error
Creation of a sermon for the file /images/sermons/Better_Together/How.mp3 failed with the following error message: This alias is already used for another item

I've gone through my sermon list and while there are three others that start with the word how, their aliases all go longer e.g. how-to-read-the-bible. I haven't found a single other sermon with the alias "how". Some of the others are even more unlikely e.g. Jehosephat. (The alias generator just seems to take the title and insert hyphens) Unfortunately, the error message doesn't actually say what the conflicting alias is. Not all the failures are single word titles.

Did you also check the trashed sermons? Sometimes you trash one and forget it still exists but it still can make the alias check fail. You can see the trashed items by filtering after this state.

The check looks for the exact alias. Different ones do not match, even if they only have one character more. I think the alias even needs to be in the same category.

The alias generator takes the title and makes it URL safe. What this means depends a bit on your Joomla settings if you allow unicode alias or not. But basically you are correct, it means replacing spaces and some special characters.