is it possible to mark items as readonly?

dankelley

It is quite easy for a mistake with the mouse to cause major changes in cited items, e.g. making a book into a journal article. I wonder whether there is a way to lock items, making them readonly unless the lock is removed? This is a feature of most operating systems, and I think it would be very handy to have in zotero, also. I wonder if this already exists and, if not, I wonder whether other users might consider this a useful addition.

As always, thanks for zotero, which is a wonderful tool.

adamsmith

Not available. I'm also surprised you find this happens easily -- I haven't done this once in 10+ years of Zotero. For one, I don't touch the right-hand panel unless I'm editing items (why would you?) Also, almost all item type changes pop up a confirmation dialog that you need to OK.

(The feature also causes no end of grief on operating systems. On these forums alone there are upwards of 100 threads with problems caused by read-only files. It's probably worthwhile there since you can otherwise mess up your whole system, but not sure we'd want to emulate that...)

dankelley

Thanks. I think I'm just bad with the mouse. My zotero window is often quite small, so I need to scroll it to see what I'm looking for. But, in any case, you have fully answered my question, by noting that I am unusual.

Actually, this is not a huge issue for me, because I have daemons that backup my database on regular intervals. I know, I'm supposed to trust "time machine" on my mac, but I am an old unix guy and I prefer to set up my own insurance schemes. That oldness probably also explains my uncomfortable relationship with the mouse.

Many thanks for the rapid and informative response.

DWL-SDCA

When I read the OP I thought that the question referred to an ability to lock parts of a record not a file.

Several times a day, when I am quickly moving my mouse to place my cursor into the title field to edit, I instead accidentally click in the item type field. This opens the drop-down type menu. This is so frequent that I find that I automatically / reflexively position a finger above the escape key to kill the drop-down as I move to position the cursor for the edit. I use a Mac and I find that this happens less frequently after I changed from the Magic Mouse to a more conventional Logitec mouse. This is a minor UI issue for me but I suspect that it is not uncommon among Zotero users.

adamsmith

They suggested locking an entire record (the file lock was just an analogy), which wouldn't help with your issue since it occurs during editing, so the item couldn't be locked.
Locking parts of records would seem to me to add an impossible level of complexity to the UI. I agree that you can accidentally click on the wrong field in the right-hand pane, but that action is trivially easy to correct (use esc, tab, or click somewhere else), so isn't particularly costly. I don't see a solution to this that doesn't involve significantly more clicks.

DWL-SDCA

@adamsmith Please understand that I wasn't arguing in favor of the ability to lock records but was reporting my similar experience and my solution. As you say, the escape key works fine when this happens. For some reason, this almost never happens to me when I use Zotero with the Windows OS -- something I do only when I'm demonstrating Zotero on someone else's machine. As you aren't a Mac user you may not have the same perspective. This isn't so much a Zotero issue as a Mac issue. Clicking to place the cursor seems different in Mac world than the "snap-to" behavior in a Windows environment. Windows seems to almost read my mind about where I want to place the cursor while I must be more precise when I click using a Mac.

I haven't used any *ux environment.