Reports without the notes

zoila

Zotero is really working great for me, but I have one function I've tried to figure out / looked for directions for in the forum without success: generating a report that just has parent items, not child notes. I've tried a number of things, but can't design an advanced search that generates a report that lists just the items and item tags, not the item's child notes and these notes' tags. Is there a way to do this that I'm missing?

dstillman

How are you generating the report? By right-clicking on the saved search and selecting "Generate Report from Saved Search" or by selecting items in the items list?

If the former, as long as the notes don't match the search conditions themselves (i.e. they're in gray, not black), they shouldn't show up in the report. The checkbox options in the Advanced Search window might be helpful.

For reports generated by selecting arbitrary items in the middle pane, if only top-level items are selected, child notes will be included for all items if the extensions.zotero.report.includeAllChildItems pref is set to true in about:config (as it is by default). You can change that setting by going to about:config in the Firefox address bar and toggling that setting, but it doesn't sound like you need to do that for what you want to accomplish.

zoila

I am generating a report through right clicking on a saved search. What I want is to construct reports at two levels of detail: A rough sketch level that just ids which documents (items) involve a selected theme (tag) and a more detailed sketch that tells me which docs involve the theme AND the specific notes on that item that have the tag. I am having no problem generating the latter, it's the former than I can't figure out how to produce.

dstillman

Slight clarification to my previous post: If the search doesn't match any child items at all (as it would if you used the "Only show top-level items" checkbox), you'll get child notes. If a single child item (note or attachment) matches, this disables the includeAllChildItems behavior and you won't get any child notes that don't match the search.

So, a couple solutions:

1) Disable extensions.zotero.report.includeAllChildItems and use "Only show top-level items" to only show matching top-level items in the report.

2) Use "Only show top-level items" but keep includeAllChildItems enabled, and instead of right-clicking on the saved search itself, select all the top-level items plus a single child attachment to force Zotero to disable the child item behavior.

#2 is obviously a hack, but it works. We'll eventually add an options window when generating reports that should make some of these things easier.

zoila

Thanks--this is great! Just to clarify: will this produce a list with just top-level items or one with top-level items and child notes with the search term?

BTW for some reason, if I only select "Search Subfolders" in my Saved Search (not Include top-level items or include parent and child items) when I generate a report it only shows the items and the child notes with the search term.

dstillman

Showing parent and child items that match the search is the default behavior. My suggestions are only necessary to override the includeAllChildItems behavior, which only occurs if no child items match the search.

"Search subfolders" should really read "Search subcollections", since that's all it's referring to. (It should also be disabled when there's no Collection condition, which would make this clearer.) It has nothing to do with parent or child items.

neaj

Logged upon request:
https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/111
https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/112

Rintze

There are some additional problems with the Advanced Search window. I think it's (eventually) due for a redesign though, from what I picked up on the forums.