Expanding / contracting collections

Following Dan's suggestion, I am opening a new topic on this. The new behavior of collection expansion in 3.0 makes it much harder to use if you have complex trees. There seems to be no way to expand a collection to see only the next level subcollections. I guess it's supposed to remember what you had expanded before, but it often ends up expanding the entire tree. And then when you try to work through this by collapsing various branches of the tree, it crashes frequently. So it becomes almost impossible to use subcollection trees with several levels. I would urgently request a way to see just the next-level subcollections under a collection -- the way the "+" used to work in 2.0.

More specifically, if I use the control key to find in what collections an item is -- let us suppose it's in two subcollections in two different top-level collections, it expands *everything* in both the top-level collections. As I remember, 2.0 used to expand only the parts of the tree with the relevant subcollection, so you could see where you were; now it becomes a mess. And again, when you try to clean it up by collapsing irrelevant branches, it crashes ("An error has occurred...") -- my impression is that it wants you to wait until it finishes processing each collapse command before you click on the next one.

(By the way, 3.0 is in general terrific -- and much more responsive, the improved search is a great help, plus a lot of little improvements. So I'm not going to revert!)
  • A wholehearted +1 from me

    I haven't experienced the crashes but I second this request - I have about 300 collections nested up to 8 levels deep, so it can become quite a mess if lots of them are open! Previously I just used to collapse my whole library and re-expand it to make it neat again (2 clicks), now I have to go through manually collapsing everything (up to about 40 clicks).

    If the current behaviour is considered desirable for the majority of users one solution could be to make ctrl/cmd + click on the arrow trigger a "full" collapse or expand of the collection and all subcollections (and sub-subcollections etc. etc.). This is the behaviour of OSX finder in list view.

    (I also second the view that 3.0 in general is great)
  • Previously I just used to collapse my whole library and re-expand it to make it neat again (2 clicks), now I have to go through manually collapsing everything (up to about 40 clicks).
    On the trunk, "-" now collapses all subcollections before collapsing the library, so a right-arrow (or manual open) will show just the root collections.

    https://www.zotero.org/trac/changeset/10598
  • Yay! and thanks.
  • Excellent, thank you - some more precious minutes to add to the countless hours Zotero saves me!
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