Sorting by attachements

hughp3
edited October 15, 2020
Greetings,

I would like to distinguish between items which have a snapshot and those which have an associated PDF. Both "classes" of items are "registered" in Zotero as "with attachments" as evidenced by the blue dot.

I am looking for items which do not have an associated PDF (and simply looking at the blue dot does not tell me what I need to know).

I thought that I could filter via saved search. So, I tried using the "Attachment File Type" option and set it to IS NOT pdf. ( I want to see the items without a PDF.) Yet Items with a PDF attached are still showing up in the search results. Am I approaching this wrong?

In my search results, I get items:
* with PDFs (solo)
* Items with Snapshots (solo)
* Items with both Snapshots and PDFs
* Items with notes and PDFs
* Items with notes (solo)
* Items with notes and Snapshots
  • dstillman
    edited October 15, 2020
    [Attachment File Type] [is not] [PDF] will find all items, parent and child, that aren't PDF attachments. Since a regular item isn't a PDF attachment, it will match. All parent and child rows of matching items will also be displayed, but the actual matches will be in black, with context rows in gray. In this case, every item in your library that's not a PDF attachment will show up in black.

    You can do what you want in two steps:

    1) Create a search for [Attachment File Type] [is] [PDF], check "Include parent and child items of matching items" and "Show only top-level items", and then save it as "Items with PDFs".

    2) Create another search for [Collection] [is not] [Items with PDFs] and check "Show only top-level items".

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