Zotero crashes when inserting citation in Open/LibreOffice text frame

donsushi

When I tried to insert citations into my document today, Zotero suddenly started spitting out weird error messages and wouldn't work properly anymore. After pulling my hair out over this problem for the last few hours, I found out it was related to a reference inside a text frame which I had placed there earlier.

The error message was something along the lines of:
com.sun.star.lang.IllegalArgumentException:
at com.sun.star.bridges.jni_uno.JNI_proxy.dispatch_call (Native Method) at
com.sun.star.bridges.jni_uni.JNI.proxy_invoke ...

Sometimes I would also receive an error "Integration (command) is not a function".

I had no idea it was the citation inside the frame that was causing it, since Zotero was working fine for some time after I had put it there. When I first stumbled upon the error, I restored an old backup of the file and it was working fine again for some time, but then reappeared. Eventually I was able to figure out the problem by following these (excellent) troubleshooting guidelines: http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting I copied all content of the problematic file over to a new dummy document and started removing parts to find out which citation was causing the problem. Another forum post about citations in tables, which mentioned a similar error message, was also very helpful: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/16262/zotero-crash-when-inserting-citation-in-table/ Eventually, I found the citation within the text frame.

Long story short: The current OpenOffice plugin of Zotero doesn't work well with "special" features, or non-ordinary parts of the document, such as tables or text frames. I'm posting this here as a help to others, so they won't come as close to throwing their system ouf of the window as I did :)

adamsmith

As a feature request/bug report this would, imho, mean that the Ooo plugin shouldn't allow users to insert citations in places where they are likely to corrupt the document.
I'm not sure how well we understand when that is the case, though. My prior understanding was that captions never work, but tables do work.
In what type of "text frame" did you insert the citation? I.e. what exactly produced the frame?

Simon

I think the plugin already prevents you from adding citations to text frames ("Zotero fields cannot be inserted here"), but maybe the error message needs to be amended to warn users not to try to copy and paste Zotero fields there either.

donsushi

Thank you, adamsmith and Simon. That is what I was about to suggest. It is a good idea to warn users not to insert a citation where it is not safe. This would probably also be fairly easy to implement. But I am not sure if it is equally easy to track where users move citations. The citation I was speaking about was originally somewhere else in the text until I moved it inside the frame.