Upgrade StorageImpossible to tell whether Advanced Search is over or still-ongoing
Recent versions of the Zotero Standalone (Windows) have acquired what I find to be a very obnoxious feature, which I would actually guess is just a bug.
It used to be the case that, when doing an Advanced Search, for instance a complex one that also searches inside the PDF attachments (option "Include parent and child.." ticked), the window would behave like any Windows window during the seconds when the search was in progress; that is, the cursor wuold stop blinking, and drop-down lists could not be clicked/opened. This way, in case your search had not returned any result and you had to change your search terms, you knew exactly when the search was over by looking at the cursor or trying to click on a drop-down list.
Now, both during and after the search, the cursor keeps blinking and drop-down lists are clickable, meaning you have to guess whether a search has finished without results, or is still ongoing.
I've found this disruptive enough to imagine that others have as well. Perhaps the developers would consider changing this behaviour back to how it was, unless in their view, this 'feature' is in fact useful? Thanks a lot!
Using v5.0.48 on Win 10.
It used to be the case that, when doing an Advanced Search, for instance a complex one that also searches inside the PDF attachments (option "Include parent and child.." ticked), the window would behave like any Windows window during the seconds when the search was in progress; that is, the cursor wuold stop blinking, and drop-down lists could not be clicked/opened. This way, in case your search had not returned any result and you had to change your search terms, you knew exactly when the search was over by looking at the cursor or trying to click on a drop-down list.
Now, both during and after the search, the cursor keeps blinking and drop-down lists are clickable, meaning you have to guess whether a search has finished without results, or is still ongoing.
I've found this disruptive enough to imagine that others have as well. Perhaps the developers would consider changing this behaviour back to how it was, unless in their view, this 'feature' is in fact useful? Thanks a lot!
Using v5.0.48 on Win 10.
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timothyl365I would like to bump this, as I also have experienced this uncertainty in searches that would return a large number of items.
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max1836Yes, I just had the problem too. It is very annoying. Lookup the "Halting Problem", ie how long should I wait?
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dstillmanThe program no longer freezing during long operations is most certainly a feature, not a bug, and was one of the major improvements in Zotero 5 — you really don't want your program to freeze and be unresponsive to input (including, potentially, a button to cancel long operations), and modern software generally no longer does that. But there's an open ticket for a progress indicator for the advanced search window.
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max1836Don't really need a "progress indicator" as such. When you click the "Check Database Integrity" button the color of the button changes. Really just need to know that Zotero is working on collecting the results vs. there are no items to display.
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djross3"Silent" ongoing operations in Zotero are confusing. Another case is when updating/refreshing a bibliography in Word (especially if updates are disabled), there's no way to know whether these processes are still going. A progress bar would be nice, but not required: just a "busy" status of some sort (not necessarily disabling the application, but just indicating the process is ongoing) would be great.