you must insert a citation before performing this operation

I wonder if the OOo-plugin sometimes fails to recognize that citations are present in a document but that the document settings aren't there, returning the above error message.

If I copy text with citations, paste it into a new document and try to insert a bibliography there I get this error message.

The same happens if I create a global document out of several chapter documents with citations and try to insert a global bibliography into the global document.

However, if I then insert a new citation into the new/global document, I am asked to set the document preferences. If I do that the bibliography is created without problems including all references not just the new one. I can then also delete the newly added citation again, everything seems to work fine then.

... which is a sufficient work around, but it's first quite confusing and difficult to figure out. So maybe it could rather prompt the set-preferences menu.

(OOo3.1.1, FF3.6.3, Ubuntu Karmic, Z2.0.3, OOo-plugin 3.0a7)
  • Hi Gitty,
    I'm having the same problem (and the same solution works). However, I'm using Mac OS.X 10.5.8, Zotero 2.0.3, Word 2004, Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3, Zotero MacWord Integration 3.0b2. If anyone has suggestions for us, we would appreciate it! Otherwise we can take the very slightly longer path to creating a biblio in a new doc with 'old' citations...
  • I'm having the same problem but the solution isn't working for me.
    My set up is Mac OS X 10.4.11, Zotero 2.0.3, OpenOffice 3, Zotero OpenOffice Integration 3.0.
    I am also sometimes getting a java error instead of the citation dialogue box.
    No idea what's going on. Could somebody please help? This paper is already a week late.
  • Can you post the first few lines of the Java error message here, and/or email a screenshot to support@zot..org?
  • edited August 3, 2010
    I get the same error on Windows 7 on Word 2007. The problem is that the work around does not seem to work. That is, when insert a new citation and generate a bibliography, only the one reference I entered is put in the bibliography.
  • Here is a bug report of this issue:
    338651177

    Here is the code it contains:
    [JavaScript Error: "syntax error" {file: "moz-nullprincipal:{67b7a3d6-8bde-41d4-a07e-c414a2e617a9}" line: 1 column: 63 source: "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">"}]

    [JavaScript Error: "syntax error" {file: "moz-nullprincipal:{67b7a3d6-8bde-41d4-a07e-c414a2e617a9}" line: 1 column: 63 source: "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">"}]

    [JavaScript Error: "syntax error" {file: "moz-nullprincipal:{67b7a3d6-8bde-41d4-a07e-c414a2e617a9}" line: 1 column: 63 source: "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">"}]

    [JavaScript Error: "syntax error" {file: "moz-nullprincipal:{67b7a3d6-8bde-41d4-a07e-c414a2e617a9}" line: 1 column: 63 source: "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">"}]

    [JavaScript Error: "syntax error" {file: "moz-nullprincipal:{67b7a3d6-8bde-41d4-a07e-c414a2e617a9}" line: 1 column: 63 source: "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">"}]
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