What is zotero://
OK, I know what Zotero is. I use it all the time. However, I just created a report from an item and noticed the following in the address bar:
zotero://report/items/0_DTDEQIU3/html/report.html
^^^^^^^
That is the part that interests me. It appears that - rather than simply creating a web server on my machine - Zotero has created its own protocol that only it knows about. A protocol that knows how to communicate directly with Zotero, perhaps? I have been trying to figure out how to do that exact thing for a different project. However, have you ever tried to search for "internet protocol" on the internet? How about searching for "http://"? For one thing, punctuation is ignored and you basically get almost every web page in the world as a search result. Not knowing any more specific terms to search for, I have been kind of stuck.
If anyone can direct me to information about how this is done, I would really appreciate it. Thank you.
zotero://report/items/0_DTDEQIU3/html/report.html
^^^^^^^
That is the part that interests me. It appears that - rather than simply creating a web server on my machine - Zotero has created its own protocol that only it knows about. A protocol that knows how to communicate directly with Zotero, perhaps? I have been trying to figure out how to do that exact thing for a different project. However, have you ever tried to search for "internet protocol" on the internet? How about searching for "http://"? For one thing, punctuation is ignored and you basically get almost every web page in the world as a search result. Not knowing any more specific terms to search for, I have been kind of stuck.
If anyone can direct me to information about how this is done, I would really appreciate it. Thank you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier
Zotero is open source - you can look for how this is done for reports e.g. in the reportsinterface.js , which in turn is part of zotero.jar (which you can search for on your computer - you'll have to include hidden files/folders in the search, though).
https://www.zotero.org/svn/extension/branches/2.0/components/zotero-protocol-handler.js