Some saved searches sync incorrectly between Mac and PC

lucas
Certain saved searches created on one operating transfer incorrectly when synced to the other operating system. This seems to be due to the different sort orders Mac and Windows assign to special characters. Specifically, the problem arises if collection names begin with special characters, and saved searches are created to look within these collections. I don't have both OS's in front of me right now, but here's an example from memory:

Say I have some collections beginning with "=" and some beginning with "@". On the Mac, the collections beginning with "=" will be listed above the collections beginning with "@". On the PC, those beginning with "@" will show up on top. Now, say I create a saved search on my Mac that has as a condition that the reference must be in the collection "=New". When I open up the same saved search on my PC, it will instead look for references in one of my collections beginning with "@". In other words, it would seem that what gets synced is the alphabetical rank number of the collection rather than the actual name of the collection. And this rank number differs between operating systems.

Can anyone reproduce this? Is my hypothesis about the syncing accurate?

If necessary, I can look again at both machines and report in more detail the conditions that lead to the error. But I'm interested to hear if others experience this.
  • dstillman
    Collection and saved search references in saved searches currently might not sync correctly, regardless of OS. They currently reference IDs, which used to be consistent between machines but are no longer guaranteed to be, rather than keys, which are preserved. So that might explain the discrepancy you're seeing. We'll update it to point to keys instead before 2.0 Final.
  • lucas
    That explains it. Thanks
  • lucas
    I wonder if this could be mentioned on the 2.0 beta known issues page:

    http://www.zotero.org/support/2.0_beta_known_issues
  • lucas
    For anyone else dealing with this issue, note that, at least for me, removing special characters from the beginnings of collection names doesn't solve the issue. In fact, I could find no way to solve the issue other than simply creating separate saved searches for each machine (or even for each Firefox profile on a given machine if multiple profiles access the same Zotero account).

    This brings up a feature request I've been meaning to mention (I forget where we're supposed to do that). It would be great to able to duplicate saved searches. That would make recreating these saved searches on my other machine a bit easier.
  • dstillman
    Fixed in the latest dev build. The fix will be included in the next release.

    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/8601/saved-searches-based-on-collections-are-not-persistent/#Comment_48190
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