Upgrade StorageAdvanced search problems & feature request
I am using Zotero 5.0.66 on Windows 10 Home. I have encountered a few problems using advanced search.
1) Advanced search does not differentiate between links to webpages and saved webpages. There are many occasions when that would be useful, e.g. when someone's preparing to work offline or wants to free their full text search from indexing unneeded material.
2) Advanced search will not search after a generic name given to saved web pages or saved links (e.g. Zotero will generate a "Snaphot" name for some web pages and will name some links "PubMed entry"). It would be a great enhancement if it could do it.
3) Advanced search fails when I try to make it search for items that have attachments of two types, namely a saved webpage and a PDF file, even though I certainly do have such records in my library.
This makes cleaning up my library much more difficult. I typically prefer not to have both a webpage and a PDF file with a snaphot of just an abstract for the same document. I also usually delete webpage links, but in the case of Google Books I prefer to have a link saved, but not a snaphot. With a link I can do some browsing in this case, but snaphot is useless. If Advanced search was capable of any two of the aforementioned points, cleaning up one's library and making it more functional would be much easier.
It may be that I am missing something. If this is the case, please help me figure out how to perform such searches. If they are indeed impossible at the moment, I would be very grateful if the wonderful developers of Zotero considered adding some of these capabilities to the Advanced search.
Thank you in advance for any help.
1) Advanced search does not differentiate between links to webpages and saved webpages. There are many occasions when that would be useful, e.g. when someone's preparing to work offline or wants to free their full text search from indexing unneeded material.
2) Advanced search will not search after a generic name given to saved web pages or saved links (e.g. Zotero will generate a "Snaphot" name for some web pages and will name some links "PubMed entry"). It would be a great enhancement if it could do it.
3) Advanced search fails when I try to make it search for items that have attachments of two types, namely a saved webpage and a PDF file, even though I certainly do have such records in my library.
This makes cleaning up my library much more difficult. I typically prefer not to have both a webpage and a PDF file with a snaphot of just an abstract for the same document. I also usually delete webpage links, but in the case of Google Books I prefer to have a link saved, but not a snaphot. With a link I can do some browsing in this case, but snaphot is useless. If Advanced search was capable of any two of the aforementioned points, cleaning up one's library and making it more functional would be much easier.
It may be that I am missing something. If this is the case, please help me figure out how to perform such searches. If they are indeed impossible at the moment, I would be very grateful if the wonderful developers of Zotero considered adding some of these capabilities to the Advanced search.
Thank you in advance for any help.
1) Nothing direct, but you should be able to combine a search for attachment type and attachment content to distinguish the two:
Attachment File type -- is -- Web page
Attachment Content -- contains -- %
will only give you items with _some_ indexed tag (i.e. successful Snapshots) and vice versa
2) Title -- contains -- Snapshot will work
3) Is indeed a bit difficult, but for some purposes, checking the "include parent and child item" will work.
E.g.
Attachment File type -- is -- Web page
Attachment File type -- is -- PDF
with that option checked returns all top-level items with both types of items attached.