advanced search not working
I am trying to locate all records that don't have pdfs attached. I set advanced search to: Attachment File Type is not PDF. Yet, in the search results, I see several items with PDFs attached. The pdfs are grayed out. I've tried all of the combinations of the check boxes. What am I doing wrong? I'm on Zotero 2.0.3.
- Open an item that does have a PDF attachment, and set a tag on it "have-pdfs" (or whatever -- a descriptive tag to that effect that does not already exist on your system);
- Do a library-wide search for "Attachment type is PDF";
- Save the search;
- Using the saved search, tag all of the top-level items (open the tag selector with ctrl-alt-T, highlight the items, drag them to the have-pdfs tag);
- Do an advanced search for "Tag is not have-pdfs".
Someone else may have a more economical solution, but that should work.Is there a bug with advanced search in terms of 'attachment is not pdf'?
When the devs come around to look, I'd guess their first concern will be with the ambiguity of this search phrase. One way to clarify things might be to just scrap it, and provide the UI with an "invert search" toggle, which is effectively what the workaround does.
In any case, I do agree with you that this should be ticketed.
[Attachment File Type] [is not] [PDF] is actually just finding all items that aren't PDF attachments (i.e., the inverse of the [is] search). Granted, this doesn't really make much sense, but you can add an additional [Item Type] [is] [Attachment] and then check both "Include parent and child items of matching items" and "Only show top-level items" to find parent items without PDF attachments. (At least, that appears to be the case, but I tested this quickly.)
None of this is to say that some of the search conditions don't need some attention.
There may not be another way to do this currently.
Can this feature be put on a soon-to-do list?