Existing citations with a ported a database

anark

I've been stuck trying to fix the OOo plugin that stopped working one day.

One solution that looked promising for a while was creating a new user account on my computer, as for some reason the OOo plugin works again with a fresh Firefox/OOo combination. The solution began to look less promising once I tried to use it. I've got a large body of .odt files whose citations hook into a single Zotero library, and once I'd copied the files to the new user account and moved the database via an export/import, I found that existing citations are broken: when adding a new citation, Zotero complains that the database entry for each existing citation does no longer exist and wants to know if the citation should be removed.

I understand that this is a known issue and that the software's architecture is being changed to prevent this from happening. Yet if I don't want to wait for the version upgrade and the Python plugin, is there a way I can make the existing citations work in the new user account using the ported database?

dstillman

Do you no longer have the original database? If you do, assuming the majority of your items were created before you set up the new account, you should export just the items you've added since you last used that database (a saved search may be helpful), use the recommended copying method to transfer your database, and then import the exported items.

Either way, you'll need to re-add the citations from either before or after (or dig around in SQLite and manually adjust the field codes in the documents). The links are lost after export/import, so a new version that addresses this limitation wouldn't help (as it will require more metadata to be stored in the document going forward in order to preserve the links).

anark

I still have the original database, and not just the majority of my items were created before I set up the new account but all of them were, and using the recommended copying method (rather than doing an Actions > Export Library / Actions > Import), appeared to have sorted the problem without causing a need to re-add any citations. Thanks for the hint!