Startup folder -- My Library. Is it a wrong design choice?

mehmet

I believe it is. If you have a few hundred records it is not a big deal, but if you have thousands of record, at each startup, one needs to wait considerable amount of time to add a new record to a collection.

I'd like to make it clear that I am not against the notion of My Library. At some point, it may be useful to have a folder that contains everything. But to start with that folder at each time seems to be a mistake to me.

I'd suggest the designers to keep track the pointer of the last visited collection / subcollection, which would contain much less records; hence, each startup would require a negligible amount of time.

If it is not clear what do I mean by startup, let me explain it a bit further. Every time you open Zotero (either by a mouse click or Ctrl+Alt+z for the poped up windows of the printer versions of webpages) on a newly opened Firefox window is a startup for Zotero, that is, all records in your Zotero collections need to be retrieved into My Library on that window.

If, on the other hand, only those records that are in your current subcollection is retrieved (on a priority basis) first, and the retrieval of the rest is postponed and done in the background, the user would not need to wait unnecessarily.

Best,

--mehmet

scot

I'm not sure that would solve the problem, since zotero initializes its database the first time it is opened in a new firefox session (presumably to avoid lengthening firefox's own startup time by doing it at every ff start). It would have to do this whatever folder is in view.

The best (or only) solution just now is just to fire up zotero before you want quick access. Subsequent opens are much faster.

dstillman

Well, it might help. There are two things that slow down the loading of the library. First, Zotero loads and caches the data values for all visible fields for all items in the library (which is needed to sort the list—we can't do it in SQLite for a number of reasons). Second, it runs the actual sort operation. Scot's right that the first only happens the first time Zotero is opened per Firefox session, and that's what takes the most time. The second happens every time the library/collection is loaded (though that could probably be changed in the future).

If we kept track of the last-opened collection, it's possible we could cache the visible fields only for the items in that collection and avoid the long delay until the library was actually selected. At the very least, it'd avoid the library-sorting step.

I'll look into making this change.

mehmet

Dan, thanks. That would be very helpful.

To support that second point as well as to remind you before you plan/design any changes that this problem is also visible when you Add an item to the Related field of the current record.

Thanks,

--mehmet