Add a way to go to referring article when searching notes?

karindalziel · October 13, 2006

If this is already possible, sorry, I missed it.

Say I have a saved search looking for the term "library" in notes. I get a result that is a list of notes with the term library-

http://www.nirak.net/zoteroquestion.jpg

But, I can't find any way to link these notes back to the original reference. Is there a way to show the notes in context or link back to the original reference?

dstillman · October 14, 2006

No, you're right--there's no way to do that currently, but we have it on our list. Added this to Planned Features page.

Displaying child items in their hierarchical context in searches is a little problematic in general. If you create a search that matches both a parent item and a child item, you'll currently get both the parent item and the child item in the search results, with an arrow next to the parent item to display all its child items (including the one that is already displayed in the top level), since we felt it would be somewhat confusing/disconcerting to see items without their children in one view and with them in other. One option is to display only the children that match the search, auto-expanded, but that may be more confusing, and if children were always displayed under their parent items, 1) if the parent item didn't match, the parent would need to be grayed out (or something) to indicate that, and 2) you wouldn't be able to do a search and only display notes, without their parents, as the screenshot above shows. The latter's probably a dealbreaker.

But with the added ability to quickly jump to the item in its proper hierarchical context (double-click, perhaps), the current behavior may be the best option.

Melani99 · February 20, 2007

Please move this high on the to-do list! Fortunately, I figured it out early enough, so that I will now make sure to put all of my tags in the parent item -- otherwise, there is NO point in searching for a fact, having it come up on the notes, and then not being able to figure out what the source of it is!

dstillman · February 20, 2007

Please see this thread (and the other two threads linked from it in addition to this one).

The source of child notes shows up above the note in the right pane. In the next release, clicking on that will jump to the parent item. There've been a number of other changes as well that let you quickly get to the parent item--they're described in those other threads.