exporting multiple subcollections

zoyoni

hello all, i just joined and did many searches; apologies if this has been addressed elsewhere.

i have divided my bibliography into many subcollections for ease of browsing, but if i want to generate one massive bibliography, zotero (v1) is NOT allowing me to right click on the collection and "generate bibliography from collection" (that option is greyed out). it makes me go to each subcollection and generate. is there any way i can fix this? is this fixed in v2?

noksagt

You would need to enable recursive collections, so that parent collections would list the contents of child collections:
http://www.zotero.org/support/hidden_prefs

adamsmith

If you want a bibliography of all your items, you can go to my library, ctrl+a (or cmd+a on a Mac) in the center panel and then right-click Create Bibliography from selected items.

If you want to create a bibliography from the contents of several collections, the easiest way is probably to do a saved search and do the same - I don't think it's possible to select several collections at the same time.

For me at least, the right-clicking for a single collection only works if the collection has been selected before - i.e. left-click collection --> right-click collection and you should be able to create bib from collection.

If you have subcollection within that collection and want all items included, you may have to set "recursive collections" to true:
http://www.zotero.org/support/hidden_prefs#general_preferences

zoyoni

noksagt: PERFECT! why would this be hidden, i wonder? is it a particularly dangerous feature to have :-) thanks again.

zoyoni

adamsmith: thanks for your comments too - how do you do suggest i do a saved search for everything?

however i have noticed that enabling recursivity doesn't apply all the things well - for instance, generating a report gives me an "invalid ID"

adamsmith

no nothing dangerous at all- I think whether preferences are hidden or not is mainly a judgment call about how likely it is that they are needed and how often they are going to be used:
You don't want to have a preference window with 200 choices to make. In some cases (including this one) it's probably a borderline decision.

adamsmith

as I said - if you want "everything" you just go to my library and do ctrl+a.
Otherwise you can just use "collection is" multiple times and connect the strings with "any".

Edit: Note that collections are not like folder. Everything that's in any collection or subcollection is contained in "my library".