Trouble with user feed

snoogles17

Hi,

I was trying to set up an IFTTT recipe so that new references added to my private Zotero library would be exported into my Evernote account. I copied the feed address, which looked like this

https://api.zotero.org/users/<user ID>/items?key=<key ID>

But it's failed, even when I change the access levels (was just trying to give it a shot). Does anyone have an idea of what might be going on? This is the recipe I was using:

https://ifttt.com/recipes/2037-new-zotero-items-sent-to-evernote

Thanks!

adamsmith

if you paste the full URL into your browser do you see the last added items?

snoogles17

Well, when I do that it automatically pushes it to my RSS desktop reader to subscribe to - but then I get a message, "Your search did not match any feeds." So I'm guessing something is wrong with the address?

adamsmith

yes. Obviously I can't really tell you what, but this should include a list of the last items you added. I assume your library isn't empty?
If you go to https://www.zotero.org/settings/keys and click on "Edit Key" for the key you set up for your feed, what exactly are the settings.

snoogles17

Yes, my library is populated. :)

Here are the settings when I click on "Edit Key":

Checked all boxes under "Personal library."

Checked "Read/Write" under "Default Group Permissions."

Nothing Checked under "Specific Groups."

adamsmith

certainly should work. I'd try looking at some other feeds - e.g. for a specific collection or so - to see if that works.
The general structure of your api call looks right and the API is working fine for me, so neither of those are the problem.

snoogles17

Ok, I'll try another feed and see what happens - thanks for your help! I'll let you know if another feed works.

snoogles17

I'm back - I checked another group feed, and ran into the same problem ("Your address did not match any feeds" on the RSS reader, and "Recipe check failed" on IFTTT). A little baffled... but, if nothing comes to mind in terms of what might be wrong, no worries - I appreciate your help.

adamsmith

what happens with a public group feed?
https://api.zotero.org/groups/4211/items/top?start=0&limit=25

snoogles17

same thing... :-/

adamsmith

hmm - that's rather bizarre. The IFTTT recipe may well fail, since I believe it only grabs new items. So what to check would be if it triggers when you actually add an item.
But your RSS reader should definitely pick up items on those pages (they're atom feeds, not RSS, so if your RSS reader only does actual RSS that would be an explanation, but it would also be very odd).

snoogles17

It is rather bizarre - I checked the documentation on the RSS app that I'm using and it says that it supports atom, RDF, RSS 2.0.

adamsmith

yeah, I don't think there are any apps that don't support atom, but you never know.
I'd still try and see what happens if you temporary prevent it from automatically opening all feeds for your browser.

snoogles17

I checked the original feed address on the IFTTT recipe and my RSS reader opened it fine, no problem. So then I tried formatting my feed address in that way, but IFTTT only accepted my api as it was originally generated. So I'm now thinking it must be an Evernote problem. Maybe I'll try deactivating the channel and reactivating, and see if that works at all.

snoogles17

actually I realized what I wrote doesn't make sense (because my RSS reader still won't open the original API), but I guess I'll try it anyway.

snoogles17

Well, I admit defeat - I have no idea what is going on, having gone through all my preferences, authorizations, and access options... I'll just figure out another workflow. But again, thanks for your efforts!

adamsmith

so you're saying your RSS reader is fine with
https://api.zotero.org/users/810/items/top
but not with
https://api.zotero.org/groups/4211/items/top
?
are you sure about that?

snoogles17

No, it's fine with both - it's just not fine with my own API as referenced in the first post. I hadn't tried https://api.zotero.org/groups/4211/items/top in my RSS reader, but it didn't work in the recipe.

adamsmith

oh, but when you say it doesn't work in the recipe, that just means there has been no new item - the recipe only gets triggered by new items. Or are you saying the recipe throws an error?

snoogles17

Right... so what I've been doing is saving a new item to Zotero, syncing, and then seeing if it triggers. It doesn't, so then I force a run, and it says, "Recipe check failed."

It's weird - even when I make my api public so that it doesn't have the key suffix at the end, the RSS reader won't recognize it (but will recognize the other ones in that format). But regardless of what feed address I actually use in IFTTT, none of them work.

adamsmith

it's not a general IFTTT issue. If tested Zotero-generated Atom feeds with IFTTT and it works nicely, so I find it hard to say what's not working.

If your RSS reader doesn't recognize the feed from your own library, of course, that does suggest something is wrong with the feed itself.
How about this for testing:
Generate the feed for just one collection with not too many items (must be <150). That should look something like this:
https://api.zotero.org/users/2433/collections/T82QIRI4/items/top?start=0&limit=25&key=<key>;

then then replace "start=0&limit=25" with "format=bib" (no quotation marks) so you have
https://api.zotero.org/users/2433/collections/T82QIRI4/items/top?format=bib&key=<key>;
and see what happens
That should give you a formatted bibliography and if not a better sense of what's happening

snoogles17

1) Okay, when I made my library private again and copied the feed for one collection and changed it as you suggested, IFTTT said, "Not a valid feed url, missing feed title."

So I switched the library to public, and it accepted it. But then the recipe failed again.

2) With the RSS feed and private API and changing it to "format=bib" for one collection it again said that it couldn't find the feed.

adamsmith

1) Okay, when I made my library private again and copied the feed for one collection and changed it as you suggested, IFTTT said, "Not a valid feed url, missing feed title."

sorry, this wasn't for IFTTT and it's not a feed so it's bound to fail there. It just returns a html formatted bibliography. I wanted you to try to open it in your browser to see if your API requests work in general.

snoogles17

oh, okay - I tried the api in the browser:

https://api.zotero.org/users/<user id>/collections/I3B7AMJZ/items/top?format=bib&key=W3YYrz8KeM7PcuXv0YKRcefW

And it came back just with "invalid key" in the window.

adamsmith

OK, so that's helpful - something is wrong with the key.
Is that exact key - i.e. W3YYrz8KeM7PcuXv0YKRcefW
listed on
https://www.zotero.org/settings/keys
?

(btw. your user ID isn't secret - it's part of the URL associated with your forum account, i.e. 771639 )

dstillman

That's not a valid key for any account.

(But also, don't post keys publicly unless you create one explicitly for testing and limit it to a test group. An API key should be treated like a password.)

snoogles17

Thanks for your patience!

Okay, I must have deleted that key above. I just created a new key for a collection and inserted "format=bib" and it worked. I think I may have deleted the "&" before the "key..." part.

(oh and thanks re: user ID and key privacy - I think my brain's getting a bit fried, haha)

adamsmith

OK, now try that same feed - but delete format=bib& (note that you need to delete the ampersand, so you'll have ?key=...)
First try it in your browser/RSS reader. You should now get the contents of the collection as items.

Once that works, try it in IFTTT

snoogles17

I had to create a new key because I saw that I had done some cut and pasting since the last time I had created that last feed, and in itself, the feed address did not have the"collection/...." part in it.

When I went to create and save a new key, it came back with "No token was provided to match against." I still tried to copy and paste the feed from my reader and change as you suggested to see if it would come up in my browser, but for some reason it's not having it.

snoogles17

So I opened Firefox because in Safari, there is no built-in RSS reader so it automatically has you pushed to the desktop reader. I tried the feed as formatted in Firefox, and it popped up in feedly. So that worked.

Next, IFTTT. Pasted that same feed, added a new item to the collection. It wasn't triggered, so I force-ran it, and "recipe check failed" came up again.

adamsmith

Have a little patience & make sure (in Firefox) that the new item shows up in the feed. If it does, try triggering again. IIRC, when I tried this I had to wait a couple of minutes.