Upgrade StorageWord plugin annoyances
Hi,
For some reason (which is probably worthy of a separate discussion, but I can't be bothered with it), a whole lot of my records magically vanished from the database. Very annoying of them, but they apparently didn't affect the db integrity etc. I've chalked that one up to 'irritating' and am going through replacing them (I have a hard copy of the document).
That's an annoyance in itself, but more annoying is the Word plugin. When I edit a reference, or interact with Zotero at all, it realises that references are missing from the database, and proceeds to go through my entire document telling me when the underlying ref is missing. 76 mouse-clicks later I can resume what I was doing.
Two things come to mind:
1. Zotero should have a better dialog box other than, "This reference is missing, do you want to delete it."
a. If there are multiple references, it doesn't tell me which one is missing
b. There should be a cancel option on the dialog box so that it doesn't take be an age to proceed (I can press CTRL-Break to interrupt the code execution, but that's a poor solution)
c. There should be an option to edit / look for / replace the reference, which leads me on to...
2. Zotero should try harder to look for the reference. I don't know what key fields Zotero embeds with the reference, but if it embedded, for example, the pubmed id, it could just do a quick db search for that key and either suggest it as a replacement, or even replace it automatically.
Either way, the current implementation is a pain in the arse.
Mat
For some reason (which is probably worthy of a separate discussion, but I can't be bothered with it), a whole lot of my records magically vanished from the database. Very annoying of them, but they apparently didn't affect the db integrity etc. I've chalked that one up to 'irritating' and am going through replacing them (I have a hard copy of the document).
That's an annoyance in itself, but more annoying is the Word plugin. When I edit a reference, or interact with Zotero at all, it realises that references are missing from the database, and proceeds to go through my entire document telling me when the underlying ref is missing. 76 mouse-clicks later I can resume what I was doing.
Two things come to mind:
1. Zotero should have a better dialog box other than, "This reference is missing, do you want to delete it."
a. If there are multiple references, it doesn't tell me which one is missing
b. There should be a cancel option on the dialog box so that it doesn't take be an age to proceed (I can press CTRL-Break to interrupt the code execution, but that's a poor solution)
c. There should be an option to edit / look for / replace the reference, which leads me on to...
2. Zotero should try harder to look for the reference. I don't know what key fields Zotero embeds with the reference, but if it embedded, for example, the pubmed id, it could just do a quick db search for that key and either suggest it as a replacement, or even replace it automatically.
Either way, the current implementation is a pain in the arse.
Mat
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bdarcusThe current implementation of field/source linking is deeply flawed. But they are working on improving it.
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SimonAll parts of (1) are already implemented in the Mac Word and OpenOffice plug-ins that accompany 1.5 beta, but it may be a while before they're implemented in Word for Windows, which currently uses an entirely separate codebase. We're working on embedding metadata in the document, which should address (2), but this is not ready yet.