Upgrade Storagefails - dragging multiple items to a collection
I can select a single item in the center pane and drag it to a collection in the left pane. However, I cannot perform the same task if I select more than one item in the center pane. This has been discussed previously with complicated explanations about different combinations of items that are and are not successful. I have also followed the suggestions about changing the Quick Copy Default Output Format, although the setting that might be successful is not clear to me from previous posts.
Am I missing something in the documentation? Are others able to drag multiple items to a collection? If so any ideas what I am doing wrong.
Zotero stand alone 3.0b2.1 and Firefox addon behave the same.
Mac Pro 2.66 GHz Quad-Sore Intel Xenon, OSX 10.6.8
Thanks very much!
Am I missing something in the documentation? Are others able to drag multiple items to a collection? If so any ideas what I am doing wrong.
Zotero stand alone 3.0b2.1 and Firefox addon behave the same.
Mac Pro 2.66 GHz Quad-Sore Intel Xenon, OSX 10.6.8
Thanks very much!
If not that, you'll have to figure out some pattern of what works and what doesn't, since this works for most people.
I am wondering if *anyone* else has had the same experience even though this works for most people. Finding someone else with this problem and comparing notes might suggest a cause and a solution.
So this inability seems to be intermittent or at least not always present. And reversible. I may be doing something wrong here but the inconsistent nature of the problem makes it, as usual in such cases, very difficult to troubleshoot.
Related to this: can two or more items in a filtered list that is displayed in the central pane by dragged to a collection in the left pane? This has never worked for me, not even immediately after launch/filter. This might be easier to troubleshoot because it never works.
Debug ID after successful drag of two items: D1681804372
Debug ID after filtering and and unsuccessful drag of two items: D1990689560
But can you provide a Debug ID for a drag attempt that fails that doesn't involve a search?
Debug ID of an unsuccessful drag of two items, no searc: D1568265727.
Perhaps the following is my mistake. I am able to drag two or more items to a collection if the files contained within these items are not shown or, if they are shown if they are not selected in the center pane. That is, the selected items must be closed or the files within them must not be "selected". If I select one file within any of the selected items then the entire drag fails. Is this normal behavior? If so, can I show/hide files within all the items in the center pane using a single command. I can't see how to do this. Otherwise I need to click/rotate the left show/hide arrow of every item that shows a file. This is tedious, time consuming and most importantly error prone.
Thanks.
I looked a bit but haven't found the significance of dimmed/not dimmed file names or how to control this parameter. Doing so would probably resolve the original issue in this thread.
Any suggestions?
Thanks.
Child items can't be dragged, so if any are selected the drag fails. In theory if all of a parent item's children are selected, that should probably be equivalent to dragging just the parent, but the test right now is just whether any child items are selected. Click any item and press the "-" key. Parent or child items that match the search/parent or child items that don't match the search
Note that in 3.0 there's a Title/Creator/Year search mode for the search bar. If you select that, you won't get child items in the search results.
II am absolutely certain that I intended to test the issue of dragging child items and thought I had but since my early steps aren't documented I can't verify. I know I thought about child items and meant to eliminate them as the problem. I will post if it recurs. Hopefully I am wrong and it won't.
If I select several items that have child items displayed (i.e. the '-' is showing) then I cannot drag them to a collection. If I hide all the child items, then I can.
Is there a plan to provide another way to place items into a collection, other than dragging? It would be very useful.
I was careful to study this by creating a new collection, so no items were already in it.
(Also note that Select All will only match search matches (in black) and not search context rows (in gray). So if you're doing a search, as long as it matches just the parent items, Select All will work fine.)
Your addendum about search matches makes it even more confusing to me. What if I want my search term to include matches in child items, even when the search only matches something in a child item and not the parent (the most glaring example being a note I've made on an item)?
That it doesn't work when all child items are selected is just a side effect of the above test.
Dan: I get what I have to do now, thanks for the added information. Just to recap: do a search, hit the '-' on my keyboard, then I can select all and drag away.
I can imagine there was a discussion about how to handle this case; i.e. whether to forbid the action, or to allow it with the implicit understanding by the user that ALL children get copied regardless along with the parent. My vote would have been for the latter, but it's fine now I understand the behaviour.
ps.: Is it worth me putting a feature request in for an alternative method of adding an item to an existing collection? Sometimes while dragging it's not easy to see which collection is highlighted during hover.