Help understanding search expansion behavior

warwickmm

I'm having trouble understanding some of the search behavior. I've tried to read the documentation and several forum posts, but was hoping that someone could help clarify some things for me.

There are several posts that suggest using the "Title, Creator, Year" search will only search parent items. I was interpreting that to mean parent items in the search results would not be expanded to show child items. However, this does not seem to be the case. In the below image, searching for "decoding" yields two results, one of which is expanded.

https://postimg.cc/5HNZHWjG

If the expansion is expected, then my next question is why the first result is not expanded as well. If I manually expand it, we can see that the filename is grayed out, but does contains the search pattern:

https://postimg.cc/Ln3Cj0dM

Is there a simple explanation for the above behavior?

This is using version 6.0.20 on Linux.

adamsmith

(FWIW, I don't see this working in any predictable way either; for me it finds a tiny subset of PDFs, ignoring others with the exact same title )

warwickmm

Just wanted to note that this is still an issue with Zotero 7 (7.0.0-beta.51+7c5600913). To test this further, I duplicated the item that gets expanded, attached a copy of the PDF, and renamed it file accordingly. This duplicate does not get expanded in the search results while the original does.

https://postimg.cc/cK4PSy9D

From what I can tell, all the entries in the Info tab (aside from Date Added and Modified) are identical. The attachment filenames are also identical. Below is a screenshot with all the results manually expanded.

https://postimg.cc/9wTnpW0f

This is all with a "Title, Creator, Year" search.

warwickmm

I submitted debug ID D405981679 for the situation in the original post (2 matching parent items, but one is expanded).

I'm not sure if I'm reading it correctly, but after a query it says

Creating tmpSearchResults_5jVkc06A with 3 items


which presumably includes the child item that is expanded?

warwickmm

I think I've discovered a clue. Items whose attachments have annotations are expanded. In this screenshot,

https://postimg.cc/5HNZHWjG

the first item's attachment does not have any annotations while the second one does. Once I highlight something in the first item's attachment, it becomes expanded as well.

This also explains the situation above where the duplicate item was not expanded (because it did not have any annotations).