Trouble moving items between collections

kadiddle

I use Zotero standalone (I always update). I'm having a lot of difficulty moving items from one collection to another (using drag-and-drop). Sometimes it's fine, in fact I don't think I've ever had trouble moving an item from the Unfiled folder into a collection. But when I try to copy/move an item between collections, often the item simply doesn't copy over. Also, sometimes in the process of trying to move it, a collection (or several!) will inexplicably move inside another collection , and pulling it back out is as difficult as getting a single item to move. As a result I've often spent a good ten minutes to copy a single item into the correct folder and fix the damage to the collection structure. I wish one could simply right-click an item and select the collection from there!

I want to mention that this is also an ergonomic issue. Holding the mouse button and moving the mouse around puts considerable strain on the arm nerves, exacerbating a problem I already have. My arm actually hurts from all of this.

Thanks!

elizwood

I've had exactly the same problem. Could someone explain if there is an alternate way to move files than drag-and-drop?

adamsmith

I don't understand the extent of the problems that drag&drop causes - and we'd be interested in replicable bug reports there - but kadiddle is correct that ergonomics (and accessibility) kind of demand having another way of doing this and devs are aware of this - it's unlikely to happen super soon unlike someone provides a patch, but it's definitely planned in general.

Evagation

Has this drag-and-drop problem with standalone been resolved? I can't drag-and-drop at all. I can neither drag-and-drop into collections, or drag-and-drop to create child items. It seems like standalone isn't "grabbing" my unfiled item - I can select the item to pull up it's info in the far-right pane but I can't seem to grab the item in order to drag-and-drop it somewhere else.

Has this issue been resolved? I don't know how to generate a bug report when I'm not getting any errors because I'm not getting any response at all. (Does that make sense? It's not that I am given an error report because the drag-and-drop feature is broken, it's rather that the feature is simply dead in my standalone, as if it never existed at all.)

Thanks.

aurimas

This is certainly not an outstanding issue in general (i.e. it works fine for me on Windows 7). What OS are you using? What version of Standalone? Is this in a personal or group library? Try submitting a Debug ID instead.

minicht

I have encountered this problem several times as well. I submitted debug id D628307580.
Windows 7 Professional, Zotero Standalone 4.0.17, Chrome 31.0.1650.63 m
Thanks for a great piece of software.

minicht

To further clarify what I was doing - I had an item in one collection and I was attempting to drag it into another collection. This does work *sometimes*, but certainly not all of the time. I've noticed that as I drag an item to a collection, the name of the receiving collection usually disappears, and then I can successfully drop the item. If the name of the receiving collection does not disappear (as happened when I submitted the debug id), I cannot drop the item.

fcheslack

@minicht
Not sure what you mean by the collection disappearing, but when you drag onto a collection it should highlight it. When it does not it's because the item already exists in that collection, so dropping there has no effect.

aurimas

Actually, at least on Windows, the highlighting is not really working. The name of the collection disappears instead of getting highlighted.

And yes, the "highlighting" does take some time to appear in some cases (one way I can reproduce is: first try to drag an existing item to a collection, then try to drag a new item), but that doesn't seem to affect actual drag-drop behavior in my case.

minicht

@fchleslack - thanks. I hadn't considered that duplicates aren't allowed. What defines a duplicate? Just a duplicate DOI, or something more?

adamsmith

no, it would have to be the same item, not just a duplicate: Since collections work essentially like playlists, you can have the same item in multiple collections.

ylxdzsw

Hi, is there any workarounds?
My installation works well before but today I cannot drag and drop anymore. the pointer no longer changes when I start dragging and nothing happens when I drop them.

adamsmith

Make sure you have restarted Zotero. You can still make other changes, e.g. add a new item to a collection? If so, provide a debug ID for trying to drag an item to a new collection: https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output