"Saving item" after scraping does not disappear

peter

Hello,

I've encountered this bug today, although I could not reproduce it (yet)): I went to an amazon site, and clicked on the book icon in the address bar to scrape it. In the lower right, the window "Saving item: bla bla" appeared - and stayed in the foreground - even closing the browser did not help (a firefox.exe process remained in the process list!)

Regards,
Peter

new-user

I can confirm this - seems like a bug. Firefox version: (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0), Zotero 1.00b2.r2

Adding a book from Amazon.com worked; but trying to add any refs. from Pubmed or Hubmed just shows "Saving Item..." - which doesn't add the item and only goes away when you add an item that will save (e.g. I tried pub and hub-med - no dice - but Amazon.com worked for me).

Also, might I respectfully suggest that you have an easier way to report bugs? Joining the forums isn't too much overhead, except that there's a whole load of text about 'you might get rejected' and 'accept our terms and conditions'. Why not just have a form? If users are happy to have dialogue with you about a bug, they can leave their email address, and if not, you'll still get a bug report... I'm keen to use Zotero but it's taken me 10 minutes to figure out how to communicate with you, decide to join the forums, find the correct place to file this, etc... I think you could potentially missing out on good feedback. Maybe this is something your technology advocate hire will sort out? :-)

edit- just found "contact us" - 9th item down under the second heading in 'Documentation'? I still don't feel like you particularly want to be contacted! Really not trying to be critical here, just helpful.

jverber

"Also, might I respectfully suggest that you have an easier way to report bugs?"

I second the suggestion. I'd love to see a bug tracker for bugs, and have "Troubleshooting" in the forums be for just that, troubleshooting. I'd love to see Trac, but anything will do.

dstillman

I can reproduce this if I try to use a translator while viewing a saved search -- confirming as a bug. Are people also seeing it with the Library or a regular collection selected (assuming a restart after experiencing it once)?

Re: the forum registration warning messages, they're part of the default text from the forum software and yes, they're quite unnecessarily off-putting. We'll fix that. Agreed that Contact Us is also too buried.

Re: bug tracking, we use Trac internally, but our reason for not opening it up to the public so far is that, without a larger team, it would become a considerably less useful tool for the developers. (Mozilla has an entire team dedicated to bug triage.) We do try to keep the Known Issues page updated, but we understand that the current system can be a bit tedious, so we'll try to come up with a solution in the near future to let people contribute and follow progress while keeping a workable system for development.

new-user

For me to reproduce:

1. Open Firefox
2. Find an abstract page, e.g.
http://www.hubmed.org/display.cgi?uids=17054214

3. Click on Zotero citation add icon in title bar
Message:
[Could not save item. An error occurred... etc.]
This disappears after a few seconds.

4. In Hubmed there's an Export link below the abstract. Click this and choose the RDF export. For me, the details then show in plaintext in my browser window. Click icon to add to Zotero, now get "Saving item..."
The item doesn't get saved and the 'Saving item...' will only go away with a FF restart.

Same behaviour occurs with Zotero window hidden or present. Can also reproduce with Pubmed.
Doesn't seem to make any difference if I have the Library or any collections highlighted in the open window.

Thanks also for your response re. bug reporting, I appreciate that you are indeed responsive!

dstillman

Ah, OK, looks like a different problem on Pubmed/Hubmed from what I found. (An uncaught error during scraping will generally have the same symptom—the stuck-open progress window.)

I'm able to save from that first Hubmed URL without problems, but the RDF does fail. We'll take a look at both. Thanks.

omar

i've seen this for any address link icon -- whenever i select that icon, i get the ref information 'saving item...' pop-up, and it never goes away. i've done this on amazon, google scholar, random publisher sites, ...

this is super annoying, esp. when you have a bunch of tabs open and don't feel like closing and then having them all reloaded. hopefully it will be fixed asap.

dstillman

Re: the issues with Hubmed/Pubmed, what's happening on the RDF export page is that Zotero is simply failing to remove the URL bar icon on the XML page, so clicking it throws an error that keeps the "Saving item..." window open. (Zotero doesn't currently support scraping directly from an XML file like that, so the icon shouldn't actually appear—we'll have a fix for that in the next release.) Saving the item should be possible from the main article page without clicking through to the RDF, however. We're still investigating what's causing a save from there to fail with the "Could not save item" message for some people—it seems to be occurring almost exclusively to users outside the U.S. (who could conceivably be receiving a different page structure, etc.), but that may be coincidental. If people outside the U.S. are able to use the Pubmed translator without problems (or people in the U.S. aren't), please let us know.

Re: the other issues with the "Saving item..." window not disappearing, we'd appreciate any further details people can provide by following the Advanced Instructions on the Reporting Bugs page (http://www.zotero.org/documentation/reporting_bugs)—there should be an error or two in the Error Console after a failed save that leaves the window open.

peter

Hello,

I can confirm that my problem occurs when I try to use the translator on a saved search.

Regards,
peter

kkraus

Thanks Peter and others. I've reproduced the "saving item" error and have created a ticket for it.