Copy and move drag-n-drop actions do not work

uppsalo

If I drag an item from one folder into another I believe it should in theory perform 3 possible actions:
- move the item (default action, a little straight arrow is displayed under the mouse)
- copy the item (by pressing CTRL, a green + sign is displayed)
- link the item (by pressing CTRL-SHIFT, a round little arrow is displayed)

However, no matter what keys are pressed and what icon is displayed under the mouse, the result appears to always be a link action. The item will be present in both original and new location, and if deleted from either, it will disappear also from the other location.

Using Zotero 1.0.10 with Firefox 3.0.9 on Ubuntu Linux 9.04. I have experienced this bug with many previous versions (always on Linux, never tried Mac or Win).

Thanks

dstillman

There's a ticket for moving items between collections instead of copying them, but I think you misunderstand how collections work. All items exist in the library, and collections are essentially tags. So removing an item from a collection won't remove it from any other collections. Right-clicking an item and choosing "Delete Selected Item from Library" will delete it from the entire Zotero library.

uppsalo

Thanks, I did misunderstand and, actually, I did miss the "Remove Selected Item" option all together. I was performing the "Delete Selected Item from Library".

Let me leave some more user feedback.

1) The copy behavior, as I understand it, sounds counterintuitive. When I press CTRL and the + sign is shown, my expectation is a real copy operation in which a new item is created and all attachments inside (in my case normally PDF files of the article) are duplicated into a new storage directory.

2) The difference between Delete and Remove would not be intuitively clear to me if you did not explain. Maybe the two could be renamed to
- "Remove selected item from this folder"
- "Delete selected item permanently from the library"

Thank you!

travhard

My assumptions were the same as Uppsalo's and I proceeded today to move all my items from the main index into folders, THEN I DELETED THEM FROM THE ROOT FOLDER.

Everything disappeared, as designed. So...is there any way to get them back?

dstillman

travhard: If you're using Zotero 1.5, they'd be in your trash folder. If you're 1.0.10, and you haven't yet closed Firefox, make an immediate back up of the zotero.sqlite.bak file in your Zotero data directory (or the whole directory, to be safe). In 1.0.10, the zotero.sqlite.bak file is a copy of your database as of the last time you closed Firefox, and you could replace the existing zotero.sqlite with zotero.sqlite.bak to revert to that version. The file timestamp is probably a good indicator of whether or not you'd want to do that.

If you're using 1.0.10 and you've closed Firefox, you'd need to restore from a backup you made yourself. If you've added items since your last backup, you could export them to Zotero RDF and then import those into your restored database.