Unable to refresh document

les9756

I am writing a paper in Google Docs and have about 160 citations. However, Zotero was being extremely slow, so I chose not to automatically refresh after inserting a citation and refresh manually. Now it can't seem to successfully complete refreshing manually. After up to two hours, I get various errors, such as:

Please save changes in smaller batches using Document.saveAndClose(), then reopen the document with Document.openById().

How do I do this? Also, half my citations currently look something like this: {\rtf ({\i{}2})} which is my main worry. I tried to download it to a word document, but that seems to unlink my Zotero citations. Please help! I do not want to lose these citations!

adomasven

Try refreshing the document with the Zotero Beta Connector which includes a fix for this and should improve the speed of updates in the future. The initial update may take an hour or more, but it should improve afterwards.

les9756

I tried that and got this error:

Zotero experienced an error updating your document.

Document update for batch size 1 failed with error Too many changes applied before saving document. Please save changes in smaller batches using Document.saveAndClose(), then reopen the document with Document.openById().. Not going to retry

adomasven

If you click to edit an individual citation in the document and hit Enter when the citation dialog shows up, does the update go through? Are you using any other Google Docs plugins? Could you copy some sizable chunks of the document that do not include citations to a new Google Docs document and attempt the update again?

les9756

Yes, citations update (but change to (1) since I do not have it set to automatically refresh with each citation). No, I am not using any other Google Docs plugins.

I have tried copying and pasting, but it seems to unlink my citations (this would be especially useful when pasting into Word - is it possible to maintain the link?). This makes it difficult to update by section, since I can't copy and paste between Google docs without losing the links I have a citation after every few sentences unfortunately - there aren't any appreciable chunks without citations.

Do you think if I copied into word, then re-linked every citation, this problem would go away? I am willing to do that, but it would take me many hours and I still have a lot of citations left to add. It would be a bummer to waste a day doing that only to have zotero not able to refresh again.

Thank you very much for your help, by the way.

adomasven

You will certainly not have this problem if you move to Word. Copying between Google Docs and maintaining citations is unfortunately not possible right now and it's not clear whether we'll ever be able to support it. Either way, this is mostly an issue on documents that go beyond a certain number of characters and citations and were created using the stable version of the connector We seem to have it fixed in the beta connector, but only after an initial pass which has to succeed at least once. The way to make it succeed would be to remove a part (or multiple parts) of the document but since copying citations in a document does not work, they have to be parts of the document without citations.

Sorry you're having this experience, let us know if you succeed in making it work in Google Docs.

les9756

Okay. If it's a character/citation issue, I'm never going to get it to work... I have attempted to refresh at least 10 times. I guess I have to make the switch to word. Thank you for your help. One more question - I am almost out of space and I want to make extra sure that "purging" gets rid of the attached pdfs, but not the citations themselves. This is correct?

adomasven

The number characters and citations is no longer an issue with the Beta connector as long as it can make that first pass over the document.

The purge only removes associated files, not items. But you shouldn't need to purge your Zotero storage, you should just opt out of file syncing if you are running out of space. You rarely want to purge storage at all, e.g. when you want to sync group files but not your personal library ones. If you do it without disabling file sync your files will eventually resync and fill up the storage again.

les9756

Since the characters/citations is not an issue with the beta connector, I took your suggestion to cut out text without citations (just in a lot of little chunks) and it was able to make that first pass! Thanks so much!

adomasven

Thanks for letting us know and glad it worked out. The stable Zotero connector has now been updated with this fix, so you can switch back if you don't want to be on the Beta version, which occasionally might introduce some instabilities.