Dragging a pdf off of its item

Jon Rubin
Hi there,
currently running Zotero 5.0-beta.219 on Windows 10.
Is it (can it be made) possible to drag a pdf off of its parent item so that it becomes orphaned? You can currently drag a pdf from one item to another, but not off any items altogether. This would be v. helpful as currently if the connector saves a pdf as attached to web page I either have to manually edit the web page to the article or (slightly quicker) copy the pdf to my downloads, store it in Zotero, then retrieve metadata.

Or, perhaps even better & simpler - could 'retrieve metadata' still be an option for a pdf that's attached to a webpage - or any item type for that matter.
  • bwiernik
    You can drag a PDF off its parent, a blue line should appear between two items in the list showing that it will be orphaned, not attached to a new item.
  • Jon Rubin
    slaps own forehead - yes you can, *except* when you are looking in a saved search folder, and, in my defence: I have a lot of them, and use them constantly, and basically forgot that they aren't normal collections, so some things aren't possible in them that would be in a normal collection.
  • bwiernik
    @dstillman Any reason this couldn't be possible, with the attachment then disappearing from the view if it doesn't meet the search criteria?
  • dstillman
    Dragging a child item off and having it disappear seems like it could be a little alarming, and you'd essentially be dragging to a target that doesn't allow drops, which sort of breaks the logic of the action. So I'm not totally convinced that we should allow this. If we think it's sufficiently useful to allow, we should probably switch to the library root and select the dropped item rather than staying in the search, particularly since that's likely the item you want to interact with further anyway.

    But the real solution here, as Jon says, is just to make it easier to update parent metadata based on a child PDF, overwriting the parent metadata (though possibly with a window previewing the changes).
  • bwiernik
    I agree. I'd dragging off is allowed, switching to the library root is best. The major case where one would want to do this is to re-retrieve bad metadata. In that case, being able to retrieve new metadata then launching the merge items dialog to merge the changes would suffice. However, I can also see other cases where this might be helpful, such as if you discover that a PDF has been attached to the wrong item. So, both the re-retrieve metadata option and also allowing attachments to be dragged off in saved searches seems useful.
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