Merging items does not preserve all attachments

bjohas

D1886452697
D1905708380

Hello all,

I was under the impression that Zotero would always preserve all attachments when doing a merge. However, I've noticed some cases recently, where this doesn't seem to be the case.

Item 1:
- PDF (Title: "Paper A")
Item 2:
- PDF (Title: "Paper B", otherwise identical)

If those items are merged, then only one PDF is retained. My preference would be for both to be retained: At the very least it's confusing that one of the files disappears...

However, in some cases there's more manifest loss of information:

Item 1:
- Link (Title: "A", URL: "url-one")
Item 2:
- Link (Title: "A", URL: "url-two")

If those two are merged, only one of the links stays.

In a merge, is it intended behaviour that Zotero performs a check as to whether attachments are the same (or similar) and therefore doesn't move them to the new item?

I've submitted log ids, in case it's unintended behaviour.

Many thanks!

adamsmith

That's intended, yes (and was frequently requested before it was implemented). Not sure if there's a pref to out, but I don't think so

dstillman

Yes, if the PDFs are identical or functionally identical (i.e., the same content), it will merge any annotations and keep one. The other will be in the trash with the removed parent item. There's no pref for this.

bjohas

OH NO!

For our use (e.g. with Kerko) that's a real issue :( For Kerko, a group library essentially is a data store, so we need to be sure of the integrity of the data.

We often have an annotated and non-annotated versions of Pdfs and we don't want those to be affected

Also, link attachments have a functional role for us - why are links that have different URLs merged?

I can see that from an end user perspective, this is a great feature. However, for us, and the many Kerko sites we have, this is a really problematic change.

Is it at all possible to get a preference?

dlesieur

When two items are merged, if each has notes or PDFs with different content, all are preserved with the merged item. But if they have link attachments with different URLs, then only one is preserved. That feels inconsistent to me, because in the case of a link attachment, the title and URL are the content (at least in my view!).

bjohas

This plugin https://github.com/edtechhub/zotero-edtechhub now disables the new merge behaviour, preserving all attachments (as was the case previously).