Context Menu Irregularities: "Add Attachment" vs "Add Parent"

marsh
Z 5.0.17 on iMac w/ Mac OS X 10.10.5 (Yosemite)

"Right" Clicking on an item brings up the context menu. Most of the time the menu has an "Add Attachment" item in the seventh slot. The submenu from the item has three members: Attach Link to URI, Attach Stored Copy of File, and Attach Link to File.

But sometimes the context menu has "Add Parent" instead. It took a while to realize it has the same submenu. But "Add Parent"???
  • adamsmith
    Add parent should be for files that aren't yet attached to an item holding metadata. Is that not the case?
  • marsh
    edited September 8, 2017
    The impression I had is that the item did have metadata, but I may be wrong. I'll have to wait until this happens again and pay special attention to see what's going on.

    Some of the services I've been using, including Google Scholar, give a link to a pdf file instead of an entry with metadata. On others, the Zotero scraper has been coming back with a web page item instead of the journal article described on the web page. Maybe one of these behaviors was not leaving metadata and thereby triggering the Parent item.

    The next few times this happens, I'll make a special note.
  • marsh
    edited September 8, 2017
    Just ran into an example of improper scraping, but the item in Zotero had the Add Attachment menu item anyway.

    To reproduce, go to the Harvard Business Review web site (https://hbr.org/) and search for "Schmenner." Select Roger Schmenner's article titled "Look Beyond the Obvious in Plant Location." Click on the Zotero scraper icon (I'm using Chrome 60.0.3112.113). Instead of saving the article as a journal or magazine article, it will be as a web page.

    But the context menu includes Add Attachment, so the metadata are adequate for a parent.

    So if improper scraping is the source of the problem, it must be for something more complex.
  • adamsmith
    No, it wouldn't be poor metadata quality (I don't think we get good results from HBR, so that's not a bug, just not implemented). It would actually be an attachment like a PDF that's not attached to an item.
  • bwiernik
    I think you are possibly just misremembering. Add Attachment appears when you click on parent/metadata items, whereas Add Parent appears when you click on Standalone attachment file items. It would be a bug if they appeared in the reverse situation, but I’ve never see that bug before. Please do let us know if you see the context menu not performing as I describe, but I don’t think there’s anything complex happening here.
  • marsh
    You're probably right. I'll just be very conscious of what's going on when this happens again.
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