Data Mofification in SQL

svdr
Hello,

I am an new Zotero user and I've got 2 questions concerning data modification.

1. I've got a lot of presentations from conferences in my library. Each presentation is tagged with the conference. I would like to add the year of the conference to the metadata. I found no way to update several data records in the gui. Is it possible and advisible to do this direcly in the sql database?

2. I would like to update some attached files. I sometimes attached a ppt file witch is not indexable. I think of adding a pdf file to each record. Is it possible to do this directly in the storage folders?

Thanks fpr your help.

Greetings
Stephan
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    It is not advisable.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited June 14, 2011
    The only recommended way of making batch changes to Zotero client data—until batch editing is supported natively—is to use JavaScript from within Firefox. It's obviously possible to make changes via SQL, but you have no way of knowing that you're entering data correctly, and it's entirely possible that you'd break syncing or cause other problems.

    Batch editing is planned, though.
  • adamsmith
    The answer to both questions is essentially no.
    1. is possible but certainly not advised to modify the sql yourself - and the write API that's been recently unveiled will likely make it easier to implement a solution for this. Right now there's no easy solution for that.
    2. You would definitely want to do from inside Zotero, not in the storage folder (if you replace the file in the storage folder you'd have to fix the link in Zotero, too, so there's really no point).
  • ajlyon
    Job (1) can be done using the server API and a library like libZotero (https://github.com/fcheslack/libZotero). That's a PHP library, which is a little awkward for a job like this, but the Python equivalent (https://github.com/urschrei/pyzotero) doesn't appear to support writing to the server, so that's the best option at the moment.

This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Instead of commenting here, you should start a new discussion. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.