Upgrade StorageChild notes accidentally dragged away from parent items
Hi,
I wanted to drag all items with a certain tag (including child notes) into a separate collection (after searching the forum I now know that this doesn't work and creating a collection via advanced search would have been much more what I wanted). It seems that I accidentally dropped the items into an empty space in the zotero middle pane, so that all the child notes are now standalone notes and I don't know how to associate them with their former parent items. Is there a way to undo this, some other automatic solution or a simple work around?
I wanted to drag all items with a certain tag (including child notes) into a separate collection (after searching the forum I now know that this doesn't work and creating a collection via advanced search would have been much more what I wanted). It seems that I accidentally dropped the items into an empty space in the zotero middle pane, so that all the child notes are now standalone notes and I don't know how to associate them with their former parent items. Is there a way to undo this, some other automatic solution or a simple work around?
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/4207/please-make-it-harder-for-children-to-leave-parents
Suggestion: a prompt "Do you really want to separate X from Y?", perhaps with a checkbox "Never ask this again" for masochists.
Since this is a troubleshooting forum and Arggem's feature request from almost two years ago seems not to be dealt with in any way, how to proceed?
I've been trying to reproduce a mass drag of child notes from their parents, without much success, but I may be missing something. When I click on the tag in the tag selector, the items appear in the middle panel, with parents greyed out, but dragging the selector label has no effect, and the "hits" in the center panel (the child items with the tag) are not selected (highlighted) by default. The only way I've found to move the individual notes is to select them individually, but that doesn't seem to be what happened in your case. I've tried an advanced search for the tag as well, which also shows the search result with the parents greyed out, but I can't seem to drag from the search result to a collection.
Is there another way to select and drag the child items only? (I do agree that a confirmation popup for moves of child items would be nice.)
Once you have an advanced search or once you clicked on a tag in the tag selector you just have to select all via Ctrl+A. Of course, not only child notes/items with the tag but also standalone and parent items with the tag are selected, but latter ones cannot be dragged into an empty space of the middle panel and thus be separated from anything. The selected child notes nevertheless do get separated, if you want to drag them (and the others) somewhere and accidentally let go of the mouse button when over an empty space in the middle panel, which is what happened to me.
Before, I also encountered this problem, but it was always only one note that I was dragging. Therefore it wasn’t that hard to find the original parent (though it is still bothersome to move the child note through a large collection, which is why, like Mark commented, “sorting by date added or using esoteric advanced search conditions” might help).
There might still be other ways to select child items, but what I think is important for this issue is not how to assemble a “kindergarten” but to prevent accidental “child abduction”.
Nevertheless here is a description of what I did, when this happened to me:
What I originally wanted to do was to create a mind map in the VUE plugin for one chapter of a writing project. I created tags according to the chapter outline (e.g. tags like "[Writing project] chapter 3.1"). To easily add resources to VUE you have to have a collection containing the resources. Therefore I wanted to create a collection for chapter 3.1 and then to add the resources to VUE. I thus added a new collection called “Chapter 3.1”, selected the tag "[Writing project] chapter 3.1" via the tag selector and then via Ctrl+A selected all items with the tag. I tried to drag the selected items into the new collection, which didn’t work, because the child items cannot be in a collection without their parents. So I just let go of the mouse and then all the selected child items were separated. (The only workaround that came to my mind was to save an advanced search (with “include parent and child items of matching items” checked) and then – because VUE cannot add sources from a saved advanced search sub collection – select all items to drag them into the “real” sub collection.)