Searching which items in a collection have annotated attachments

lguenth

Piggy-backing off of previous stale discussions, I am looking for a solution to the following comment: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/421949/#Comment_421949

How do I find which parent items in a collection have attachments with annotations stored in Zotero's database?

I know I can do something similar by extracting annotations into a note first but even then I would have to a) manually go back to check which ones I've annotated in the past and b) remember to extract each time I annotate. Also, the search doesn't really support finding child notes by title, so checking notes with "Child note contains the fixed string 'Annotations'" is ambiguous anyway:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u7843189/xvvelphnjf0z7e9k5a4n.png

Full context: I am a beta tester for v7 and truly enjoy working with the internal reader. Devs, you've done a wonderful job restructuring the app. I think this would be a great additional feature if you decide to update the search functionality at some point. Right now, I am mainly looking for a less cumbersome workaround through built-in means or plugins.

Thanks!

tim820

See the saved search method in this comment in the thread you referenced:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/419618/#Comment_419618

lguenth

Hi, thanks for the suggestion, but as stated in that thread and re-iterated here, this does not work for collections. Only the "extract from PDF into note → search by some string that is hopefully uniform across all notes because of the default template" approach works but it is very cumbersome and leads to duplicated information.

dstillman

I don't think that's currently possible, but we're working on improvements here.

lguenth

@dstillman Thank you for your reply! I'm looking forward to what you come up with. You're doing a great job and I love the direction Zotero is heading in!