Upgrade Storage(semi-)automate merging duplicates
My personal practices result in frequent need to merge rather large sets of duplicate entries. Better protection against importation of duplicates into the library in the first place would be good, but until that rather difficult problem is solved, I would appreciate it if after review of what is identified under the Duplicate Items collection (which is really quite good at finding duplicates), and removal of any I might not agree with, I could accept the rest for automatic merger. At present, I have to go from pair to pair and click on Merge 2 items.
I wrote an AutoHotkey script to activate Zotero and press "Enter" contantly. Basically, my plan is to open Zotero, navigate to the Duplicates folder, merge one duplicate and then activate the script. This way, each time "Enter" is pressed, it merges the duplicates, and then waits until Zotero is ready before pressing "enter" again.
Like I said, this is an embarrassingly low-level solution, but I'm no programmer. If I were, I'd be ashamed, but its really not worth my time to figure out how to write a plugin for this.
So: Dear future interested person,
Assuming that they have AHK in the future...download AutoHotkey here(http://www.autohotkey.com/)
install the program and then copy and paste the code I made into a notepad file. Save the file as "yourfilename".ahk Open Zotero and merge one duplicate, then double-click the .ahk script to run it.
Hope this helps someone.
Sincerely,
a person from the past
MsgBox,4,, The script is active. Would you like to cancel?
IfMsgBox, Yes
Exit
; Otherwise
Loop ;
{
IfWinExist, Zotero
{
WinActivate
}
else
{
Gui, Add, Text,, Zotero is not running currently
}
Send {Enter}; press enter
WinWaitActive, Zotero
}
return
p.s.- I can tell already from my limited debugging efforts that this script is really poorly written. the WinActivate command is pretty spotty at actually activating Zotero and not inputting enter into whatever you're working on at the moment. But in general, it works. My plan is to basically set it up to run overnight so it won't interfere with my normal computer activities. Good luck!
*EDIT: I forgot to mention that this tool obviously doesn't make any discrimination about which version to keep, or which fields to import beyond Zotero's defaults. This is fine with me, since I have far too many to care about. If you have substantial changes that you need to make sure are kept, then you'll need a finer-grained control over the duplicate merging process- in which case scripting is probably not the best solution for you anyway.
https://github.com/chrisjr/zotero-prevent-duplicates
I use it and it saves me lots of trouble avoiding duplicates.