Upgrade StorageFalse (?) error message after refresh (again)
I have a recurrence of an old problem. I refresh a large document; it updates the footnotes and builds the bibliography OK but THEN tells me there is an error.
I ran it again with debug on to make a report:
Report ID 669283846
Debug Id D819009368
I ran it again with debug on to make a report:
Report ID 669283846
Debug Id D819009368
Could you point me to where you posted about the problems with splitting into multiple chapters and/or say again why it doesn't work (or takes too long)? Technically this isn't really working for you either. You shouldn't rely on the bibliography updating to confirm whether the rest of the document has updated successfully (because in the case above it certainly hasn't).
Since my posting yesterday I re-ran the refresh several times while doing something else on the computer (but not in Word or Zotero). On no occasion did the pop-up appear that asks me if I want to keep changes. It does nothing for about 30-40 minutes and then displays the error ‘Zotero experienced a problem…’. The Zotero window may have been minimised, but not the Word window. Either or both may have been covered; I wasn’t paying attention then!
Following your suggestion, I tried this again today (on yesterday’s version) with both windows showing, and I did get the popup. Why is that? Once I clicked ‘no’ twice, I suppose it finished the refresh, but as there is no progress indicator it’s hard to tell! I had to sit and wait 30 minutes for the pop-up to appear, so it is still not a very practical option.
I tried reading the debug file as @adomasven suggested, but it is too cryptic.
Splitting the document is, as I have explained before, not a practical option. It changes the chapter and page numbers and breaks the page formatting and cross-references. I cannot afford to be doing that in the late stages of completing a PhD thesis! In any case it rarely worked for me. Usually, I could not reproduce the error that way, so could not fix it.
The least painful workaround this time was to move to a Windows partition that I set up on my Mac through Boot Camp last time you suggested it. This was not a trivial operation: I had to create the partition, install windows, hack the product code, install copies of Microsoft Office, Zotero and my password vault, then sign into everything, enable it, etc. After trying both iCloud and Dropbox (another long story), I settled on transferring the document in question using a private OneDrive account that I set up just for this purpose.
The good news is that once set up, there was no problem on Windows refreshing the document. When I press ‘refresh’ I see a progress bar so I am confident is it working. Inside a minute or so I get the first pop-up asking if I want to keep changes. I say ‘no’. It happens a second time then completes the refresh, as shown by the progress bar reaching the end.
The cause of all this trouble was no more than an inadvertent change to a citation that resulted from a global change in the document. All that was needed was a way of telling Zotero to ignore it. (I made the same changes separately inside Zotero).
The conclusion then is that there is a problem in the MacOS version of Zotero. It is failing to show the pop-up asking if I want to keep changes: 1. It should pop up regardless of whether the windows are maximised and visible, and 2. There is no reason to time it out; leave it there until I come back and provide an answer!
1. I have personally spent a large amount of time on trying to make the macOS version as fast as possible, but there is so much you can do when you are ultimately at the hands of the Apple and Microsoft
2. We are working on this
3. Ditto
4. See https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/86460/feature-request-reject-all-changes-to-zotero-fields#latest
5. This is simply not possible. For situations where we know what the problem is we display an appropriate message (like the prompt for changed citation text). Any other error that we haven't accounted for falls under "Zotero experienced (an unexpected) problem", and requires manual inspection -- looking through debug logs and Zotero code.