Google docs Zotero won't cite, just pulls up link function

Mmanierre

Hi folks,

I'm getting this on fully updated Chromium and Chrome, running the latest version of Linux Mint. Basically, when I'm in Docs I select zotero->Add/Edit citation (or any option, it seems), instead of Zotero doing anything it pops open a function that I'm not particularly familiar with: https://imgur.com/a/gjo4mtr. Any idea how to get Zotero playing nicely again?

A few things:
1) Zotero desktop is open and updated. Turning it off/on, rebooting doesn't help.
2) Browser cache clearing seems to help, but only for one or two citations before it starts doing this again.
3) Zotero has been working fine- this paper already has dozens of citations in it.
4) This probably doesn't matter, but there are lots of collaborators on the document.
5) I uninstalled and reinstalled the connector and Zotero itself just to be safe, as well as Chrome. No luck.

dstillman

I'm not sure what that function is — it's not from us, but @adomasven might know why you're seeing it — but it looks like many/all of your Zotero citations may have become unlinked and are showing in red because of it.

Everyone who edits the document needs to have the Zotero Connector installed for citations to remain functional, so if there are many collaborators, there's a good chance someone without the Connector installed made changes that broke the citations. I'm afraid you'll need to reinsert those from Zotero for them to work again.

adomasven

@Mmanierre If you try to manually insert a link (i.e. turn some text into a hyperlink) do you get the same popup?

Mmanierre

@dstillman, I noticed the red broken links, thanks for clarifying what was going on with those. We can fix these once Zotero actually allows me to add citations again.

@adomasven When I highlight text, right click and select "link," it pulls up the same menu, unless there is some small difference that I don't notice. Insert->link also pulls up the same menu.

Mmanierre

Just wanted to update that I replicated this on google chrome on a separate windows 10 PC. Pretty strange- I've emailed a video to support@zotero.org.

dstillman

Thanks for sending the video.

I'm not sure how this would be the cause, but if you temporarily download Zotero 5.0.95.1, and try that before it auto-updates to 5.0.96 (which came out yesterday), do you get the same behavior? Here's the Windows ZIP version, which you can test just from an extracted directory without going through the install process:

Update: Not the cause.

dstillman

@Mmanierre: Can you also provide Debug IDs from both Zotero and the Zotero Connector for this happening?

adampricehydro

I am also having this issue in google docs using firefox with Zotero Connector 5.0.81 and OSx 10.14.6.

Mmanierre

@dstillman I'll try rolling back versions tomorrow when I have more time.

The zotero app has no output when I try to debug it. Here's the debug info for the zotero plugin. It always starts with those errors, even after clearing the log. This is the log for me just going into google docs and trying to add a citation, which then pulls up the links window.

I've redacted the links to the google doc here for security reasons.
__________________________________________




[JavaScript Error: "TypeError: Cannot read property 'length' of undefined
at Object._updateExtensionUI (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:518:30)
at onNavigation (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:900:29)"]

[JavaScript Error: "Error: URL changed for tab https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox
at _updateInfoForTab (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:587:49)
at onNavigation (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:895:4)
at chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:929:87"]

[JavaScript Error: "No frame with id 94 in tab 101."]

[JavaScript Error: "No frame with id 103 in tab 92."]

[JavaScript Error: "No frame with id 130 in tab 74."]

[JavaScript Error: "Error: URL changed for tab [URL REDACTED]
at _updateInfoForTab (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:587:49)
at onNavigation (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:895:4)
at chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:929:87"]

[JavaScript Error: "TypeError: Cannot read property '190' of undefined
at Object.injectScripts (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:330:45)
at chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:269:36"]

[JavaScript Error: "TypeError: Cannot read property '201' of undefined
at Object.injectScripts (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:330:45)
at chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:269:36"]

[JavaScript Error: "TypeError: Cannot read property '280' of undefined
at Object.injectScripts (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:330:45)
at chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:269:36"]

connector => true, version => 5.0.81, platform => Win32, locale => en-US, userAgent => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.190 Safari/537.36, appName => Zotero Connector for Chrome, zoteroAvailable => true

=========================================================

(3)(+0014321): Connector_Browser: onActivated for [URL REDACTED]

(3)(+0005468): Connector_Browser: onActivated for chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/preferences/preferences.html#advanced

(3)(+0000000): HTTP POST http://127.0.0.1:23119/connector/ping

(3)(+0000010): Connector: Method ping succeeded

dstillman

Do you have other browser extensions installed? If so, can you disable all other extension and see if this still occurs?

If you that debug output was running while you tried this, it looks like the menu options aren't triggering any Zotero code for you at all — they're just triggering the Google link option.

Does the "Add/edit Zotero citation" button in the Google Docs toolbar behave the same way?

Mmanierre

@dstillman I disabled all extensions except Zotero and google docs- still getting the error. Below is debug with all extensions disabled.

This and the prior code were created by selecting add/edit zotero citation from the google docs toolbar. I can also get the a similar result if I just use the ctrl+alt+C keyboard shortcut.

Thanks for digging into this!

____________________

[JavaScript Error: "Error: URL changed for tab https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox
at _updateInfoForTab (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:587:49)
at onNavigation (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:895:4)
at chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:929:87"]

[JavaScript Error: "No frame with id 52 in tab 79."]

[JavaScript Error: "No frame with id 54 in tab 80."]

[JavaScript Error: "Error: URL changed for tab [REDACT]
at _updateInfoForTab (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:587:49)
at onNavigation (chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:895:4)
at chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/background.js:929:87"]

connector => true, version => 5.0.81, platform => Win32, locale => en-US, userAgent => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.190 Safari/537.36, appName => Zotero Connector for Chrome, zoteroAvailable => true

=========================================================

(3)(+0000000): Connector_Browser: onActivated for https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output#debug_output_logging

(3)(+0000004): progressWindowIframe.mouseleave message received in injected page https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output#debug_output_logging

(3)(+0002503): Connector_Browser: onActivated for [REDACT]

(3)(+0000082): progressWindowIframe.hidden message received in injected page chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/progressWindow/progressWindow.html

(3)(+0005368): Connector_Browser: onActivated for chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/preferences/preferences.html#advanced

(3)(+0000001): HTTP POST http://127.0.0.1:23119/connector/ping

(3)(+0000007): Connector: Method ping succeeded

dstillman

I disabled all extensions except Zotero and google docs

Well, no — if you have a Google Docs extension, that's the most important thing to disable.

Mmanierre

My mistake, sorry. Here it is with everything except Zotero connect disabled. The errors cleared up from the output, but it still just puts me straight to the link menu still.

_________________



connector => true, version => 5.0.81, platform => Win32, locale => en-US, userAgent => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.190 Safari/537.36, appName => Zotero Connector for Chrome, zoteroAvailable => true

=========================================================

(3)(+0017006): Connector_Browser: onActivated for [REDACTED]

(3)(+0012263): Connector_Browser: onActivated for chrome-extension://ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc/preferences/preferences.html#advanced

(3)(+0000000): HTTP POST http://127.0.0.1:23119/connector/ping

(3)(+0000006): Connector: Method ping succeeded

dstillman

This appears to be some sort of A/B test that Google is doing, or caused by something different about your account. The problem isn't in Zotero itself (no request is even making it to Zotero) or the Zotero Connector (which hasn't been updated in weeks) — the Google Docs UI is just different for the people seeing this.

Here's the link popup I see:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cxdl1i8vqj2r3gt/gdocs-link-popup.png?dl=0

We're not seeing the dialog you're seeing, so we haven't been able to reproduce this.

How does the link popup you have even work? There doesn't appear to be an Apply button, so how do you apply the change? And what do you see if you click on "In this document"?

Mmanierre

Strange, and of course completely typical of google docs to bork things just before a deadline!

The popup doesn't have an apply button, you just hit enter and it just pops it in. You can link URLs, or you can link other docs in the drive. You can then hover over the test for the linked doc and it will show you a little preview of the google doc. It's pretty cool, but it seems to break Zotero's functionality for the time. I'll get one of my teammates to try to export things into Word so that I can finalize the references there.

dstillman

So pressing Enter is the only way to apply the change? Nothing else appears in the box or elsewhere in the dialog that serves as an alternative method?

Mmanierre

You can press enter, or you can select a link that is displayed. So if you look here, https://imgur.com/a/gjo4mtr, you can see it links to a few documents- if you click those, it'll also terminate the field.

dstillman

What do you see when a URL is pasted in?

Mmanierre

If you paste in a link, you can either enter the text to show in place of the url, or you can just paste an active URL with no placeholder text. If you just have a plain URL you can hover over it and Google asks if you want to use the web site's name instead of the plain URL.

Mmanierre

I think your theory that it's something about my account having a slightly different google docs seems to be on the money. I wiped my cache and logged into a whole different google account on the same account and now my link function looks different and Zotero is playing nicely for the moment!

dstillman

OK, if you can reproduce this back in the original account, this would be helpful:

1) Right-click on the popup and choose Inspect. The Chrome developer console should open with a div selected.

2) Click on the highest div in the hierarchy that causes just that popup to be highlighted on the page. E.g., for me that's something with a class that includes "docs-calloutbubble-bubble", but it might be different for you.

3) Right-click on that div and choose "Edit as HTML".

4) Copy and paste the HTML and email it to us at support@zotero.org with a link to this thread.

This should let us see the markup being used in the version of the link popup you're seeing, which might let us update the code to interact with it even if we're not seeing that version.

Mmanierre

Just emailed support@zotero the mess of HTLM, sorry it's not very clean or readable, let me know if you needed something different.

Joby

I am getting this issue too, like it literally just started happening after I updated to 5.0.96.

__

OK that was a slightly panicked message, now let me elaborate :-D

I'm getting exactly the same issue. I'm using Google Docs with Chrome on a Mac. I updated Zotero, and immediately afterwards hitting the 'add citation' button on the Zotero menu brought up the Google links box not the Zotero one.

So, I shared the doc with another Google account via my phone, logged out of Google on my Mac, logged in with the other Google account and it works as normal so looks like it is freaky things Google's end.

(My current workaround is to have the (secondary) functioning Google account logged in in Firefox and all my primary account google drive things operating via Chrome. It is a right pain in the arse).

dstillman

No, it's not related to 5.0.96. Again, this is a change in the Google Docs interface, not in Zotero. We're looking into addressing it, but it was not caused by Zotero.

Joby

Yep, that makes sense, just super suspicious timing as it corresponded so closely :-D

I've logged the issue on the Google forum too and if I get any coherent info I'll share it back here (I have now removed it on your request).

Thanks for the prompt attention.

dstillman

No, please don't post Zotero questions to Google forums — if you have the ability to delete that or mark it as resolved, you should. Zotero integration has nothing to do with them, and our integration isn't something they support. A UI change in Google Docs is something we just have to deal with.

Joby

ok. removed.

adomasven

@Mmanierre @adampricehydro @Joby We have pushed a change to the Zotero Connector Beta that addresses the issues you're seeing. It only works in Firefox. Could you install the Beta Connector and see whether it's fixed for you?

henryfg

@adomasven I have been having the exact same issue (but have not yet participated in this thread). I tried the Zotero Connector Beta in Firefox, and it hasn't resolved the issue. Adding a citation (or choosing any option from the Zotero menu, for that matter) brings up the "Insert Link" dialogue (which is otherwise accessible from "Insert > Link" or ctrl+k).

adomasven

Do the text and search fields get populated with anything when you try to cite with Zotero in the beta? If they do, what happens if you press Enter? If you open a new link popup manually, can you close it by pressing the Escape key on your keyboard?

henryfg

@adomasven I hope this answers your question:

I try and insert a citation (shortcut, or menu - results the same) and the "new link" box from google docs pops up and the fields are empty. If I type in the search box, text appears and the menu of selections is narrowed as I type. If I type in the "text" box, text appears. When I hit enter, a link is inserted into the document, with the text and link location specified (e.g., if I type "here" in the text field, and tell it to link to introduction, I get a linked word "there" that takes me to the introduction when I click on it. If open a new link popup manually (either with shortcut or the menu) the behaviour is identical, and I can close it by pressing Escape. As far as I can tell, the zotero plugin is perfectly replicating the behaviour of the new link popup.