Multiple users on network file

easterly

I was interested if there was an option to give multiple users access to the database at the same time and if one could restrict editing permissions to a single user. This sounds like the Groups feature (though I haven't used it), but I want to do it offline, on a network server.

I found a thread that indicated that such a use was "strongly adviced against": https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/18795/.

However, the documentation for a more recent version of Zotero mentioned that it allowed "sharing of word processor documents with users of Zotero and other compatible software without using Zotero groups." I realize that this is not the same thing, but it got my hopes up.

Has any such feature been added, and if so, where can I find documentation for it?

adamsmith

No - the "strongly adviced against" still holds and won't change. Sqlite databases - Zotero's backbone - aren't suited for simultaneous access by multiple users.

The sharing you mention refers specifically to documents. Since Zotero 3.0, citation data is embedded in the document, so the recipient can work with that document in Zotero even if s/he doesn't have access to the library you used to create it.

rlukens

File locking and concurrency are available in SQLite Version 3 (http://www.sqlite.org/lockingv3.html), though there certainly could be other limiting factors in the architecture of Zotero that would make full multi-user, read/write access impractical.

My use model is to allow multiple Firefox invocations on one computer using the same Zotero database. I do code development on a laptop and on remote systems, all having a local Zotero installation, with both local and remote GUI access via multiple desktops on the systems provided by VNC. This arrangement provides several work contexts among which I can easily shift.

Having multiple session access to Zotero on a single system would be a great boon to this work model.

fcheslack

http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q5

dstillman

rlukens: I don't fully understand your use case, but if you're saying that the remote filesystems would be mounted as network drives, fcheslack's link applies. Locking simply doesn't work reliably on network filesystems (or in VMs, for that matter — it's already easy to corrupt the Zotero database if you open it from a shared disk on a VM).

But more importantly, and regardless of your setup, development for an embedded database is generally just entirely different from development for a client/server database, and that's certainly the case with Zotero. Since the vast majority of users would be expected to use Zotero with a single database, we do all sorts of caching of DB content to improve performance, rather than assuming that the DB contents could change out from under us at any time as would be the case with a client/server DB.

hhollermann

Hi,

sorry for reviving an old thread, but is this still the case for recent Zotero versions?

It would be incredibly powerful to separate zotero-database and the zotero application profile to make parallel work possible. In that case, it would immediately become the number one literature organization tool in science, I guess.

Best,

Henning

adamsmith

This thread isn't about separating the application profile from the database -- that's possible and has been for a long time, but I don't see how this would help here, given that the initial question is "if there was an option to give multiple users access to the database at the same time", which still isn't the case and likely won't be for any foreseeable future.