accessed field for pdf attachments

Hello, I have a question concerning the "Accessed" field of pdf attachments. Is it is supposed to update its value everytime the pdf is opened? I found a related discussion here for links attachments

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/4234/accessed-field-info/#Item_0

but from the ensuing ticket

https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/1179

I have the impression the answer to my question is actually rather no. However, the case for pdf attachments is a bit different IMO and I think it would make sense to have the field updated on every access. A possible use case is to keep a "cache" of articles I have recently looked at in a saved search. This way, even if I close the session, logout etc, I can quickly find the articles I was reading or working on. This might be implemented manually via tags, but a dynamic accessed field would make things much easier to handle!

One problem I can think of is with groups, in which case access times will reflect the activity of everybody in the group... maybe not exactly the best idea.

Thank you!
  • No, we wouldn't want accessed dates to do different things for different items, that'd be very confusing.
    There's an old add-on that provides access history for items: Not sure if it still works, but I don't think there is a reason it shouldn't:
    https://bitbucket.org/fbennett/zotero-item-history/overview
    Install from
    http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/zotero-item-history.xpi

    Also, if you make any type of changes (highlights, annotations) to a PDF, the date modified will change.
  • Thank you, the plugin still works and basically does what I needed.

    I think I was missing the original purpose of the accessed field. I had expected something like with creation, access and modification times of files or folders on a filesystem. They all have different values and they may change independent of one another. My conclusion is that what zotero calls "Accessed" is actually rather "First accessed", which is why the behavior was confusing to me.
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