Customizable Extra/General Fields

nicholaspkehoe

I searched on this topic, and while I found relevant discussions I did not find an exact answer. Does Zotero have any way to add in a GUI field(s) in the "extra" or other general fields? As an example, JabRef allows users to customize the "general" fields (link: https://docs.jabref.org/setup/generalfields). My use case would be for setting up fields such as "sample size" or "research methodology."

My searches lead me to believe this isn't possible with Zotero, but I wanted to confirm. I suspect I could manually do this by adding "samplesize:xxx" etc. to the "extra" field, but a more clean approach would be appreciated.

Thanks all.

bwiernik

You can add as many lines as you want to Extra, so you can put this sort of data in Extra like this:
Sample size: 123
Design: Longitudinal

Custom user fields are planned for the medium-term, but aren't currently available.

nicholaspkehoe

That is good to know. If I can ask another question, if there anyway for Zotero to 'prepopulate' the extra field so that the reviewer just adds the value? I assume the reviewer would need to write both the key and value each time. Thank you!

bwiernik

You are using this for a systematic review I take it?

You could write a script to add these values to all of the Extra fields in your library.
https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/client_coding/javascript_api#batch_editing

I think this should work. Fill in the values for groupID and newValues below, then run it using the JavaScript runner in Tools -> Developer -> Run JavaScript. The groupID is the group number you see in the URL for the group on zotero.org.

var fieldName = "extra";
var groupID = "<ENTER GROUP NUMBER HERE>";
var newValues = "<ENTER KEYS YOU WANT HERE, SEPARATE LINES WITH '\n'>";

var fieldID = Zotero.ItemFields.getID(fieldName);
let libraryID = Zotero.Groups.getLibraryIDFromGroupID(groupID);
var ids = await Zotero.Items.getAll(libraryID, true, false, true);
if (!ids.length) {
return "No items found";
}
await Zotero.DB.executeTransaction(async function () {
for (let id of ids) {
let item = await Zotero.Items.getAsync(id);
let mappedFieldID = Zotero.ItemFields.getFieldIDFromTypeAndBase(item.itemTypeID, fieldName);
let oldValue = item.getField(mappedFieldID ? mappedFieldID : fieldID);
let newValue = oldValue + "\n" + newValues;
item.setField(mappedFieldID ? mappedFieldID : fieldID, newValue);
await item.save();
}
});
return ids.length + " item(s) updated";


nicholaspkehoe

Thanks. I am using this for collaborative literature reviews and potentially systematic reviews (e.g., multiple reviewers feeding into a single report).

I started reviewing the tutorial for writing a plugin, but this seems a bit easier. I just gave it a go and ran into an error: oldValue not defined.

I see why it is being raised. If I define an oldValue I can get the script to work beautifully on the documents that have the 'extra' field set to whatever I define as 'oldValue'.

I first tried to remove the s.addCondition line, but that threw an error "Error: '22' is not a valid field for type 14."

Next, I tried to change the s.addCondition to s.addCondition(fieldName, 'is', 'any'); but that did not find any records.

Is there a way to apply this to all documents, regardless of what content is in their extra field already? I looked at the search basics on the link you recommended, and it looked like I could search without specifying conditions so I'm not sure why the error is being thrown.

I appreciate your quick responses and help.

bwiernik

Oh, sorry, forgot to change a line there. I've edited the code to return all of the items in a library.

nicholaspkehoe

Thank you! That worked perfectly.

Louise.Rouse

I'd like to second the request for custom user fields through the GUI in a similar way to how it is currently possible to add authors/creators.
At the moment I cannot find a way to add information in the "extra" space in a way that it exports properly as multiple separately labelled columns in a CSV file which is causing a lot of extra manual labour.
For multilingual records I really need a way to duplicate many fields and the "extra" "catch all"
doesn't work for CSV export :(

Louise.Rouse

.