Sorting related items

antikorpo
I think there should be a feature to sort a book by its chapters, e.g. I've imported a whole book's pdfs, but now they're scrambled, because they get sorted alphabetically. It would be nice to have a "chapter number" field for book chapters, but i think that could cause some troubles.

Therefore I suggest, that related items should be sortable. Like that, it would be easy to sort the chapters if you need to have them in order.
  • noksagt
    Book sections and special issues might be a reasonable reason why a 'sort by page number' would be useful.

    I think arbitrary per-collection sorting has been discussed. I don't know if I agree that the related items should be sortable.
  • adamsmith
    a patch that will add sorting by the "pages" field to the middle panel has been accepted and will be in the next major Zotero release:
    https://github.com/gracile-fr/zotero/commit/18111dd15dea6e6fdbe5d1423d44506aa5121106

    I don't see any reason against allowing arbitrary sorting for related items - for me it's not high priority and I have no thoughts on how hard it'd be to implement, IMHO per collection arbitrary sorting is much more important.

    I'm also not sure if a chapter number field is necessarily a bad idea - I've seen it cited at times in bibliographies and I don't see a strong reason against it apart from being yet another field.
  • antikorpo
    Great, sorting by page number would do the job, because on can put all the items into a folder.

    Chapter number might be a good idea too, specially in times of web pages and ebooks where there is no well-defined number of "pages".

    Btw, sorting by multiple columns would be cool too, e.g. first sort by author and then by title (writing about Shakespeare's time could result in a lot of same author fields).
  • johngage
    I'm referencing a series of comments on chat boards, and a series of emails.

    I'd like to be able to sort them, first by Date, then by Timestamp.

    Then, I'd like to display them in the proper order on Timeline.

    Assuming I can use Universal Time, to solve the time zone issues, is there an easy way?
    E.g., use the Call Number field, for example, to contain the Timestamp?

    Then sort, first on Date, then on Call Number?
  • adamsmith
    currently it's not possible to define a secondary sort variable for sorting in Zotero itself, nor, afaik, for timeline.

    It would be possible to put items in order following multiple sort categories in a citation style using e.g. extra or call number for the timestamp.
  • johngage
    Thank you, adamsmith.

    The ordering sequence of the items provided by Zotero to Timeline seems to be by a four-digit ID number. It's up to Timeline to display the items by date, but the date does seem to include GMT data provided by Zotero.

    I can see the xml for my items provided by Zotero to the Timeline program. It shows time data, as well as date data, associated with each item. Where is this coming from, and can I enter the true timestamp? It does seem that bibliographic entries will increasingly require an absolute timestamp capability.

    I looked at the page source for the timeline page, read down to find the place the javascript calls zotero for the XML data:
    Timeline.loadXML("zotero://timeline/data/collection/1111111_AAAAAAA", function(xml, url) { eventSource.loadXML(xml, url); });

    copied the URL, put it into the browser, and got the data Zotero is sending to Timeline: (I changed the data collection specifics here)

    Here are the first ten lines that Zotero is sending with item information. You can see they are not strictly ordered by date, but by a four-digit number whose origin I can't tell....possibly item number given by Zotero.

    I'll separate the lines:
    <event start="Wed Sep 15 1982 00:00:00 GMT-0700 (PDT)" title="Semester start 1982" icon="chrome://zotero/skin/treeitem-report.png" color="black">1727</event>

    <event start="Mon Mar 01 1982 00:00:00 GMT-0800 (PST)" title=" Submit report" icon="chrome://zotero/skin/treeitem-report.png" color="black">1728</event>

    <event start="Thu Nov 01 1979 00:00:00 GMT-0800 (PST)" title="special issue for university meeting" icon="chrome://zotero/skin/treeitem-report.png" color="black">1730</event>

    <event start="Mon Dec 31 1979 00:00:00 GMT-0800 (PST)" title="university meeting?" icon="chrome://zotero/skin/treeitem-report.png" color="black">1731</event>

    <event start="Mon Dec 31 1979 00:00:00 GMT-0800 (PST)" title="magazine: student literary magazine" icon="chrome://zotero/skin/treeitem-report.png" color="black">1732</event>

    <event start="Fri Feb 29 1980 00:00:00 GMT-0800 (PST)" title="Society announcement" icon="chrome://zotero/skin/treeitem-report.png" color="black">1733</event>

    <event start="Mon Aug 31 1981 00:00:00 GMT-0700 (PDT)" title=" Final year" icon="chrome://zotero/skin/treeitem-report.png" color="black">1734</event>

    <event start="Mon Aug 31 1981 00:00:00 GMT-0700 (PDT)" title=" countryside research trips:" icon="chrome://zotero/skin/treeitem-report.png" color="black">1735</event>

    <event start="Sun Aug 31 1980 00:00:00 GMT-0700 (PDT)" title=" Academic year begins" icon="chrome://zotero/skin/treeitem-report.png" color="black">1789</event>

    <event start="Fri Aug 31 1979 00:00:00 GMT-0700 (PDT)" title=" Sophomore year begins" icon="chrome://zotero/skin/treeitem-report.png" color="black">1790</event>
  • fredbo
    Is there any plan to make possible showing all related items in something of a kind of a mindmap? That would be really helpful!
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