Cannot attach Mac OS X file packages

Letterus

Hello,

I experienced problems when trying to attach a Mac OS X file package to a Zotero bib entry: The package is not detected as such but instead it is opened as a directory and the content of the package is shown (which I then could choose as file attachment). This is not the habit I would expect, because I cannot open these files with the corresponding application.

In this case the file packages are my outlines from OmniOutliner.

Is there any workaround for this issue or could it be fixed?

Thanks a lot,
Letterus

dstillman

Yeah, you can't do that, I'm afraid. They are directories, and Zotero doesn't allow directories to be attached.

Letterus

I would just need the "linking" attachment functionality of Zotero (not the one where the files are copied to the Zotero storage). Would it be possible to make linking to directories possible?

dstillman

Possibly, but I'm not sure it could actually cause them to be opened as files, at least without writing some complicated low-level code. We'd have to test, but there's a possibility that opening would just drop you in that folder in Finder. (You could use Show File to highlight it in its parent directory, ready to be double-clicked, but I don't think we have an easy way of telling whether something is a directory or a bundle, which is what we'd need in order to determine whether simply opening a directory should take you to the parent directory or the directory contents, assuming launching properly wasn't an option.)

But I can test this further and report back.

Letterus

Thanks a lot! The workaround via Show File works btw. It is showing the parent dir which is a regular file when viewing with Finder.

I don't know which API you use for opening files, but the shell command "open" will always open a file or directory in the proper way from the perspective of OS X. So there is a way to open files or directories in a proper way but I don't know if it is accessible to your code.