Abstracts & Searching

johnlknight

I've been appending notes to articles, theses etc, and following the b3 release, have been using the note as abstract function.

However, when I do a search, and it finds a keyword in an abstract (and not in the attendant journal/thesis info), the abstract is returned without any link/reference to the main info.

In other words only the abstract is returned without any other information.

Chears,
John

dstillman

Take a look at these two threads for some of the inherent problems here and two new features in Beta 3 that can help. Any other suggestions are welcome.

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/55/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/245/

johnlknight

neither of those is satisfactory.

Umm...I see the problem

I think the simplest and most intuitive solution would be to link the title field of the note to the parent file.

Personally, I'd like the quick search result to show the note file and its parent, with a markers, to the side of the note, indicating where the search term is located.

dstillman

You're right—the parent title at the top of child notes should clear the quicksearch and take you to the parent field. We'll add that.

Can you clarify what you mean by "markers, to the side of the note, indicating where the search term is located"? As in, indicating whether the search term appeared in the parent and/or the note? Also, if the parent item is always displayed when a child matches, what about the other child items of the parent—would it not be confusing to see only some of the child items?

While we're on the subject of search, the fulltext search engine already provides content excerpts for matched words (e.g. search for "seven" returns "Four score and seven years ago our fathers..."). Determining which non-fulltext field a search term matched would be a bit trickier on the search side but not impossible. It'd be great to work those into the search results as well, but we'd need a good UI solution. A tooltip would be the easiest but also probably the least useful. A toggle to switch the results to a two-line mode, where the matches were displayed in the second line, might work.

johnlknight

Current entries with parent/folder items show a blue verticle triangle immediately to the left of the entry. When the parent is expanded, the blue triangles turns downward.

When searching, you could use, say a red arrow or something similar pointing to the files where ther search item is located. Alternatively, the title of that (child) file where the search item is locatted could be highlighted in yellow.

Something along these lines would I think be the best solution.

Ultimately, there must be some sort of reference to the parent file otherwise the function is rendered almost useless.