Debug ID: D574298752 Error when adding citation in Word

Pan_Dar

When trying to add any citation in word, I get an error message. I had Zotero 5.0.8 installed but downgraded to stable, 5.0.7 (Win 10 x64).
And also reinstalled all the connectors (Chrome) and the ZoteroWinWordIntegration plugin.

Below you see the relevant section where things break.
It seems to be missing things from the return request: (1)(+0000009): Error: Creator data must contain either 'name' or 'firstName'/'lastName' properties
But in the debug output I only see: "author":[{"family":"Brunner","given":"Paul H."},{"family":"Rechberger","given":"Helmut"}] in the JSON no other fields that have the aforementioned properties.
Not being a developer I cannot go any further then this, and I do not even know if this is the problem.

Thanks for any pointers to resolve the issues.

Pan_Dar

The referencing works in a new document, but if I copy my text the error comes back

adamsmith

Could you also provide and error report ID from Zotero after triggering that error?
https://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_problems

(given/family is correct for the JSON -- I think the error you're picking up there is from sync and may suggest a problem in your database, which may or may not be related to the Word error).

Pan_Dar

Here is the error report ID 752596306.

The text i'm working on now was written one year ago. Old references are working, but I can not add new.
The solution I've found is to create a new document, copy only text from the old document and add all references manually again.

dstillman

Check your database integrity from the Advanced → Files and Folders pane of the Zotero preferences.

paulbrous

I have the same problem - but no issues with database integrity...

paulbrous

error report ID 95020985

adomasven

Looks like a corrupt embedded citation field issue. Embedded citations are those, that lost a link to your Zotero database, usually due to the original item being removed from your library.

Could you follow the debugging broken docs instructions, specifically #8, isolate the broken citation and send it to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread?

paulbrous

Thanks for your help - I've isolated the broken citation. this is the report number:
1641442135

Rintze

Looks like a corrupt embedded citation field issue. ... Could you follow the debugging broken docs instructions, specifically #8, isolate the broken citation

@adomasven, is there a JSON schema for Zotero citations? One possible feature for "ref-extractor" would be to identify corrupt citation fields, which could probably replace step 8 in many cases. I currently just silently ignore anything that doesn't have the expected field prefix or isn't valid JSON. If I could validate the JSON against a schema I could probably identify most problematic cases.

dstillman

This should be fixed for the next version. Nothing corrupted — just a bug in Zotero.

@paulbrous: You probably figured this out, but it was a reference from 2002 with a second author with a first name but no last name. This error occurred when refreshing an citation that had a missing first or last name and that didn't exist in the Zotero database.

adomasven

@Rintze On one hand we should do this ourselves, on the other hand there's a non-trivial amount of code in the integration codebase that is intended to support and convert previous formats (and an old format causing a problem was the culprit here too), so there isn't just one schema per-se. There is a canonical format now that hasn't changed for a few years and it makes sense to document it. I'll look into it at some point.

dstillman

Checking the data wouldn't have helped in this case, because the data was valid — it was just due to a change in input validation in Zotero 5 that caused existing parsing code to fail.

It does seem like we should be able to do a better job at making #8 unnecessary, though, whether by validating the data or, more importantly, by catching errors in more places and giving proper feedback. Even though this was a bug, this shouldn't have been an uncaught exception — it should've displayed a message that that specific citation was invalid (even though it technically wasn't).

Rintze

There is a canonical format now that hasn't changed for a few years and it makes sense to document it.

That would be great, and documentation might help improve interoperability between embedded CSL citations between programs.

Somewhat related, do you rely on csl-citation.json and csl-data.json in Zotero? I was wondering if I could safely update our current schemas at https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema, which are still JSON Schema draft 3, whereas the latest draft is version 6 (http://json-schema.org/specification-links.html). See also https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/issues/127

adomasven

Not at the moment.