access zotero database from outside application

Riccardo Cohen · October 28, 2011

Hello

I have developped a musical score management software for a musicologist specialized in Hurdy gurdy !

She has about 7000 musical score lines related to antique songs, with many information about authors, editors, dates etc., and she manages this with my software.

But she also has a lot of multimedia documents : images, pdf, word, video, mp3 etc on an external disc. I suggested her to put everything in Zotero and add as many tags as possible for each document.

Now I want to search Zotero database and find the documents from my application (without launching Zotero). Is there any C# or C API available, or is it even easier to search directly in SQLite database ?

I have managed to find the related tables : items, itemData, itemDataValues, itemAttachments, itemTags, tags. So I think I can do it all right. But I would like your opinion about this. In particular about fulltext search which seems a bit more complicate...

Thanks a lot.

adamsmith · October 28, 2011

have a look at the Gnotero plugin
http://www.cogsci.nl/software/gnotero
I believe Sebastiaan searches the SQlite directly, that should give you one way to procede.
There is also a local API
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/client_coding/javascript_api

edit: any further questions on this should go to the dev list:
http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-dev

Riccardo Cohen · October 29, 2011

Thanks for the information, I'll go to zotero-dev.

ajlyon · October 29, 2011

In addition to echoing the recommendation to consult zotero-dev, note that Gnotero provides a Python library for accessing your library, so this becomes quite easy to do if you can use Python:
http://www.cogsci.nl/blog/tutorials/97-writing-a-command-line-zotero-client-in-9-lines-of-code

http://files.cogsci.nl/software/gnotero/extras/gnotero_cmdline.py