"Newest episodes from my selected podcasts" is now buildable in the UI,
end to end — the user could not find ANY podcast-related filter surface
because none existed: the New Collection modal could only create
book-scope smart collections, and the engine's episodes scope (item 3.1)
had no authoring door.
The scope door:
- The create modal's Smart card gains a Rules-scope segmented control
(📚 Books / 🎧 Podcast episodes); the copy no longer claims smart
means "match books by rules". Choosing Episodes seeds an EMPTY
episodes tree ({"scope":"episodes","mode":"all","children":[]}) so the
collection is born episode-scoped: the editor opens with the episode
vocabulary (feed/downloaded/played/published date) and membership
runs the episode engine from the first rule.
- ParseFilterTree now accepts an EMPTY ROOT (nested empty groups stay
invalid) — the seed's legal shape. The root arrives at depth 1 by
call convention, hence the depth>1 exemption.
- The composers define the empty-tree semantics: zero children matches
NOTHING (ComposedLiveMedia/ComposedCount guards), mirroring
EvaluateSmartCollection's zero-enabled-rules convention. Without the
guard the composed query degrades to the bare scope head and a fresh
collection would swallow every episode in scope — pinned by
TestEpisodeCollectionsEmptySeedMatchesNothing (envelope book_count 0)
and TestEmptyRootTreeSeedsEpisodesScope.
The curated chain order (plan §10 R2, user need: the briefing plays
NEWEST-first):
- view_settings.chain_order ("native"/"newest"/"oldest"/"reverse")
stored on the collection — curated content, not a player-side knob.
- PUT /api/collections/:id/view-settings merges the key into the
stored JSONB (a blind write would clobber the playlist toggles).
- buildSmartCollectionSequenceContext routes OrderEpisodes through
handlers.CollectionChainOrder; the detail header's Play-as-Sequence
gains the order select next to it (PlayCollectionButton), which
PUTs and reloads. Pinned by chain_follows_the_curated_order
(reverse flips the chain indexes and hops).
Caught by the new test, a latent clobber fixed: UpdateCollection
treated a NIL view_settings payload as "write NULL" — any edit that
carried no settings dropped every stored key (chain_order, playlist
toggles from API clients, imported provenance). Nil now means
untouched, the same convention filterTree already had.
Composer guards also cover ComposedCount, so the builder's live count
reads the same semantics. Tests: collectionChainOrder unit matrix,
empty-root parse unit pin, two integration pins (seed matches nothing;
curated order drives the chain and survives whole-map edits).
John O'Keefe
cc0e9d7f91