search filter

udotirol

Hi,

I am just making my first steps with zotero and so far, it looks extremely useful :)

What I have some troubles with, is how search results are displayed.

Say that I have a huge number of books, all of them with multiple notes associated to each book. Each of those notes has one or more tags associated again.

If I now filter by one tag, the search results show not only the matching entry but also the parent item (the book) plus all notes below that book entry. All the non matching entries are greyed out a bit, the matching entries are black.

While that may be feasible for a small number of entries, the search result list becomes cluttered with non-matching entries quickly for a greater number of entries, no matter if they are greyed out or not.

Is there a way to completely filter out (=hide) the non matching entries?

Thanks for this great product!

dstillman

Not sure if this will be exactly what you want, but you can click in the middle pane and press "-" (minus) to collapse the list to just the parent items.

It's not possible to hide the gray context rows. Zotero always display all child items of expanded parents.

udotirol

Thanks Dan for your response, unfortunately this is not exactly what I had in mind :)

The problem I have with this is that the search results then mostly consist of entries not matching my query, greyed out, but still, the majority of search results show exactly the non-matches.

Imagine those entries:

book section "some interesting things"
+ note A (tags: foo, bar)
+ note B (tags: non, sense)
+ note C (tags: important)
+ note D (tags: optional)

Now if I search for "foo", I see all the notes of "some interesting things" listed, even though neither note B, note C or note D are relevant to my search query.

This somehow limits the usability of the search functionality.

dstillman

Yeah, so unfortunately there's not really anything to help you with this. The reasoning behind the current design is that showing, say, child notes without other sibling items would be disorienting/alarming, and often not what you want anyway, since often you're searching for a word that you remember from a specific note but are still interested in the other notes on the item. I suppose I could see some sort of UI switch that toggled showing non-matching items (including parent items or just child items, I'm not sure), but I'm not sure where it would go or how much use it would get, and it create an additional mode that would need testing and maintenance.

davidbrucesmith

I disagree that the reasoning. "Disorienting/alarming" is subjective and only for those who do not understand a particular system. I have a project with thousands of notes. Many of my sources could have many many notes. When I run a Tag filter, I would like to be able to see ONLY those notes that contain the tag or set of tags. Why would this be alarming? As soon as one turns off teh tag filter, they all pop back., I do not see how this would "alarm" someone. So, instead of getting a shorter list of notes that contain the tag, I get a very long list that I have to scroll through to find the notes that meet the tag search criteria. I work with UIX a lot and this is NOT user friendly.

adamsmith

Right, but even if you disagree with whether that's disorienting as Dan points out above, that's not the only -- and in our experience very much not the typical -- use case. When I search for a note or filter by a tag, I most definitely _do_ want to see e.g. the parent item or the attached PDF.