Subcollections in API

Guillaume Larocque
Hi, there is currently no way to obtain all items in subcollections of a specified collection in the API. In the Zotero interface, we can see these by using the 'recursiveCollections' setting in the configs.

This could be achieved by adding a

<userOrGroupPrefix>/collections/<collectionKey>/collections/children/items

setting or something like that in the API which would return all items in children of a collection.

Another approach would be to add an entry:

<zapi:collection>Collection_ID_here</zapi:collection>

in the ATOM results for each entry. So, when we make a request to

https://api.zotero.org/groups/GROUPID/items/

We would be able to identify which items belong to which collections. Note that this is currently impossible.

These features would be extremely useful to us and would, for example, prevent us from making 100 API requests to obtain the newest entries for the 100 subcollections in one of our collection.

Thanks!
  • dstillman
    Another approach would be to add an entry:

    <zapi:collection>Collection_ID_here</zapi:collection>

    in the ATOM results for each entry. So, when we make a request to

    https://api.zotero.org/groups/GROUPID/items/

    We would be able to identify which items belong to which collections. Note that this is currently impossible.
    An item's collections are included in the content=json response in version 2 of the API.

    (Also, better to post API questions to zotero-dev.)
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