Trying to rebuild Saved Searches via API

tzucker

I am trying to rebuild my saved searches using the API. I have several hundred saved searches. I would like to be able to reference these instead of collections. Iam still using the 4.0.29.16 version of zotero (firefox plugin).

Does anybody have any experience doing this and have some pointers for someone who have never used an API before?

dstillman

API questions should to go zotero-dev.

dstillman

(Though do you mean the web API or the client's JavaScript API? I'm also not clear what you mean by "reference these instead of collections", so I think you'll need to provide more details on exactly what you're trying to accomplish, what you've tried already, etc.)

tzucker

I am an end user. I have been told that I could only access the saved searches on the zotero website via the API. This only returns the search criteria. So Now I would need to rebuild the searches "using the API." I don't know how to do this. I have looked at the output from the API (https://api.zotero.org/users/1099825/searches?v=3&key=mykey, ) but it is not obvious what needs to be done or even how.

I am not a programmer. I have been using zotpress on my wordpress blog to publish my collection, which is fine except, you only see the collections, not the saved searches. The zotpress developer said this is rather low on her things to do list.

My problem is that I have literally hundreds of searches and collections (1 collection for every search - which doubles the amount of time I spend doing this, I hope it doesn't double the amount of space I use). As I update my collection (daily) the searches find changes automatically, but the collections do not.

Am I missing something? Is there a better way to do this?

I would like it much better if I could just reference the dynamic searches instead of the static collections.

dstillman

Sorry, I'm still having a hard time understanding what you're trying to accomplish. I don't know what "rebuild the searches using the API" means. Can you give a more concrete example?

tzucker

I am referring to this comment

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/256498/#Comment_256498

adamsmith

I'm sorry, but there's not going to be a non-programming solution here. You need some way to do two things in sequence:
1) Call the Zotero API with the saved-search ID and get all item IDs in return
2) Populate a list with all items corresponding to the item IDs

By it's very definition (i.e. you get some information and then re-process it to do something else), that will have to be done in some type of programming way. I don't see any way that doesn't use a 3rd party tool like ZotPress or your own coding (in whatever fashion/language you prefer; PhP would probably be the easiest) to do this.

tzucker

Thanks - unfortunately Zotpress does not access saved searches yet.

adamsmith

OK, I may not be expressing myself clearly:
You cannot do this without a programmer/programming, sorry.

tzucker

Okay