Operations on large search folders

timothyl365
I am having difficulty performing tasks with large search folders. Operations are slow and progress is not indicated well.

For example, I have a search folder called "not annotated". It contains ~4000 items. "Highlight all" is very slow. Once that works, I would like to "extract annotations" on all papers. I don't expect this to be fast, but the progress indication doesn't really work. The box shows things for a few seconds, but eventually disappears and I am left guessing whether the process continues.

Do search folders perform the search again every time a new operation is requested?
  • timothyl365
    BTW, "not annotated" means that there is no child note found that contains text "Extracted Annotations". That is, the annotations have not been extracted yet.
  • dstillman
    Extract Annotations is a ZotFile feature, not a Zotero one, so I can't advise on that.

    For the general issue, speed in a saved search depends on the search condition(s) used and whether a particular operation causes the search to be run again. Child Note does a full search of child note content, and that's currently a relatively slow operation, so if the ZotFile command does trigger another search, that could result in some slowdowns. We have some improvements planned to searching that should help speed up searches like that, but it may still be a while until they happen.

    In the meantime, you might see a bit of a speedup if you temporarily close the tag selector in the bottom left before a large operation.
  • timothyl365
    Perhaps my description is not limited to a search folder after all.

    I now notice difficulty in simply showing "My Library" (8000 collapsed items). CTRL+A to "select all" and then pressing "+" to "expand all" makes Zotero freeze. This happens with the tags section opened or closed.

    It took 2+ minutes to recover and complete the operation.
  • dstillman
    Two minutes is a bit unreasonable, and if you provide a Debug ID for this we can have a look, but expanding all items is a non-trivial operation — it needs to load data for thousands of items — so that's probably not the best example. It might also be faster the second time, if you collapse (-) and then reopen (+).
  • timothyl365
    I would be grateful for that. Thank-you!

    Debug ID: D2073921534

    This instance describes "select all" and then "collapse all".

    ~14000 items expanded
    ~8000 items collapsed.
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