Checkbox selection with Web Translators

rkaplan@umrpc.com · March 30, 2019

Some of the web translators recognize if checkboxes are chosen on a website, e.g. on Pubmed if you select citations with their checkboxes, then those items are automatically checked when the selection dialog box appears inside the PubMed translator.

But the DOI translator does not have this feature to recognize checkboxes on the originating website. What would be involved to add that feature?

dstillman · March 30, 2019

That's only possible in site-specific translators. The DOI translator is just looking for DOIs in the page text, so the rest of the page UI doesn't mean anything.

rkaplan@umrpc.com · March 30, 2019

What is involved in adding that feature to a site-specific translator?

dstillman · March 30, 2019

For what site?

rkaplan@umrpc.com · March 30, 2019

It would be for a site I created with an MySQL report generator web app. I still need to see if I can add the checkboxes to that site - if I can, then I need to figure out how to get Zotero to recognize them.

Right now the DOI translator works very well on this site with its built-in checkboxes - but there are so many citations on the page that it would be really nice to do the checkbox selection on the site itself rather than in the DOI translator.

A beta of the site is at:

https://www.seektable.com/public/report/17874907ad0e469cab9f6c45f85ce024

dstillman · March 30, 2019

Well, the checkbox part isn't really important — that's just a one-line change. But you would need to actually write a translator for the site.

dstillman · March 30, 2019

Translator development instructions are here:

https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/translators

This is what pre-selects checkboxes in the Select Items dialog:

https://github.com/zotero/translators/blob/57723690fd4503d4472db6e108cbdcdff4d115e8/PubMed.js#L174