Error occurred when updating OpenOffice document for Zotero 2.0

bgeer

I have just upgraded Zotero from version 1.0 to version 2.0.2, and opened an OpenOffice document that I had previously made with Zotero 1.0. The first time I attempted to edit a citation, Zotero said: "Your document must be permanently upgraded in order to work with Zotero 2.0b7 or later. It is recommended that you make a backup before proceeding. Are you sure you want to continue?"

I clicked OK, and the following error message appeared in a dialog box:

An error occurred communicating with Zotero:
java.jang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: -2
at java.lang.String.substring(String.java:1937)
at org.zotero.integration.ooo.ReferenceMark.getCode(ReferenceMark.java:243)

I clicked OK, and another dialog box appeared, saying: "Zotero experienced an error updating your document. fieldCode is null".

Creating a new document and adding a citation seems to work fine. Is there a way to work around this bug in order to update my documents to work with Zotero 2.0, or should I go back to Zotero 1.0?

dstillman

We should be able to fix this in the plugin, but in the meantime see Debugging Broken Documents.

bgeer

Thanks. Following the advice in "Debugging Broken Documents", I deleted the bibliography in a fresh backup copy of the document. Then when I tried to edit a citation, Zotero said "Your document must be permanently upgraded"; I clicked OK, and got no error. I then regenerated the bibliography and everything seems OK.

(Other suggestions in "Debugging Broken Documents", which I tried first, didn't work. I tried copying and pasting the document content into a new document. When I then tried to edit a citation in the new document, Zotero said: "You must insert a citation before performing this operation." I tried switching to a different bibliography style, but got the same "StringIndexOutOfBoundsException" error message as in my comment above.)

bgeer

I tried updating another document in the same way (by deleting the bibliography first), and got a different error, which required a different workaround. Why I tried to re-insert the bibliography, I got this message:

An error occurred communicating with Zotero:
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.zotero.integration.ooo.ReferenceMark.(ReferenceMark.java:69)
at org.zotero.integration.ooo.Document.getFields(Document.java:277)

It was followed by this message:

Zotero experienced an error updating your document. fields is null

I cut and pasted the second half of the document's contents into a new document, and was able to insert the bibliography into the original document without error. I then tried to find "the problematic citation" by cutting and pasting the second half of the text back into the original document, one page at a time, re-inserting the bibliography each time. I never found "the problematic citation", because this cutting-and-pasting operation seemed to correct the problem; now that I've pasted all the text back into the original document, I can insert the bibliography without error.