search just one folder in a saved search

marisabrandt
Is it possible to search just a single folder in a saved search, or to add a tag to all the items in a given folder so that you can search for that tag AND whatever else you're interested in searching for?

Not sure if I've missed something here, but I didn't really see anything relevant on the forums...

Thank you!
  • dstillman
    There's a "Collection" search condition in the drop-down list.
  • vadb
    I second marisa's suggestion of having the ability to add a tag to multiple items at once.
  • dstillman
    I second marisa's suggestion of having the ability to add a tag to multiple items at once.
    Select multiple items and drag them to a tag in the tag selector. If in a collection, the "Display all tags" checkbox might be helpful.
  • marisabrandt
    Thanks, Dan. I saw that, but didn't click on it because I assumed that it referred to an item attribute (e.g. archival collection).

    This leads me to another question - is it possible to construct a search like so:

    A must be true;
    AND
    any of B, C, D, or E are true
    ?

    I'd like to do an "any of the following match" search, but only within a certain sub-folder.

    Thanks again!
  • marisabrandt
    Any idea what the size limits are on that kind of drag and drop? I tried it just now, and it caused FF to become non-responsive. I have 450 or so items in the collection I'd like to tag.

    Thank you for all your help.
  • dstillman
    A must be true;
    AND
    any of B, C, D, or E are true
    Constructing a clean interface for that would be challenging (though not impossible), but there's a way to do it now. Create an ANY saved search for B, C, D and E. Let's call it Search 1. Create another saved search with condition A and Collection is "Search 1" (saved searches are listed under Collection). Make it an ALL search, and you should get the results you want.
  • dstillman
    edited June 4, 2008
    Any idea what the size limits are on that kind of drag and drop? I tried it just now, and it caused FF to become non-responsive. I have 450 or so items in the collection I'd like to tag.
    Zotero doesn't have any way of knowing where you're going to drag the items, so it tries to generate citations for those items in the off-chance that you're dragging them outside of Firefox. There's a ticket to limit the number of dragged items that Zotero tries to generate a bibliography for.

    In the meantime, you can drag in a few batches.
  • vadb
    Dan, thanks for the suggestion, but I couldn't get this to work for items that have attachments - I've tried dragging a single item that has a pdf attachment but with no luck. Dragging the attachment (pdf) worked fine however. As a sidenote (I could very well be answering my own question here), I have an extension called Web Search Pro that allows for looking up any text on a webpage by dragging the selected text to a region at the edge of the screen, which then opens up the search results in a new tab. Could there be a conflict between this extension and Zotero in terms of the dragging functionality?
  • marisabrandt
    Thank you - that will do the trick very nicely.
  • marisabrandt
    Dan, this search doesn't behave as I expected it would:

    "Constructing a clean interface for that would be challenging (though not impossible), but there's a way to do it now. Create an ANY saved search for B, C, D and E. Let's call it Search 1. Create another saved search with condition A and Collection is "Search 1" (saved searches are listed under Collection). Make it an ALL search, and you should get the results you want."

    My ANY save search seems to work as expected, but when I construct an ALL search with "collection is" my saved search AND the subfolder I wish to search, I get far fewer results than I should.

    In other words, I can see that certain entries exist in both places, but they don't appear in my new search that specifies both collections.
  • Tjowens
    I think you may be running the search backwards. "Match ALL of the following" should give you a more narrow set of items, only those items that match each of the criteria. "Match ANY of the following" will give you wider results, namely every item that matches any of the individual criteria you have set. Try reversing this in your two searches and you should get the the right results.
  • dstillman
    No, the conditions sound correct. There definitely might be bugs here, as combining these sorts of boolean searches is a rather complex affair behind the scenes. I'm currently working on a similar problem.

    If you can provide a simple test case (with as few conditions as possible), I'll take a look.
  • marisabrandt
    Sorry, my description was probably confusing. Here is what I am doing:
    1.) searching for ANY of the tags 1890s 1900s 1910 1920s to generate the list of citations relevant to the section I am currently writing. This is a great list, but it's important to separate out primary source material from my secondary sources, which isn't obvious from the short titles as they appear in the report. So:

    2.) I save that ANY search, and then construct an ALL search that has two conditions: 1. appears in my ANY search and 2. appears in my "archival primaries" folder.

    The intent is to construct a search that shows me ONLY the primary source notes that relate to the time period I'm examining. It should be a very limited list, but still larger than the one I am getting, which actually only has two results. I want to see all entries that appear in my original saved search and in my "archival primaries" folder, but can't seem to make that happen.

    I hope this is a clearer explanation - this process is surprisingly difficult to describe!
  • marisabrandt
    Dan, something is definitely buggy with it - if I instead construct a search that is ALL of my saved ANY search plus "collection IS NOT" "archival primaries," I get a large number of entries that are in the archival primaries collection. (I'm assuming these are the "missing" entries from my original attempt....)

    What do you need for the test case? That is, do you need my data, or just the explanation I outlined above?

    Two other, related questions:
    1. Is there a way to force child items (notes) to have the tag/tags of the parent? My problem would disappear if I had an easy way to tag all the notes in that folder as "primaries". (We are likely talking about 1000s of items - there are 450 or so entries, all of which have multiple notes, as that's how I separate each possible source quote.)

    2. Do the child notes "belong" to the collection? That is, is it possible that I'm not seeing what I expect because the notes are not covered by my search conditions, just the parent items (not all of which are tagged as 1900s or whatever)?

    Thank you so much for all your help.
  • dstillman
    What do you need for the test case? That is, do you need my data, or just the explanation I outlined above?
    An ideal test case would be something we could reproduce in as few steps as possible from an empty library. For example, "create a new book item, give it the title 'foo', create another book item with title 'bar', create an ANY saved search with conditions Title is 'foo' and Title is 'bar'..."
    1. Is there a way to force child items (notes) to have the tag/tags of the parent?
    No, but see below.
    2. Do the child notes "belong" to the collection? That is, is it possible that I'm not seeing what I expect because the notes are not covered by my search conditions, just the parent items (not all of which are tagged as 1900s or whatever)?
    At present, child items do not "belong" to the collection. For some searches, however, you can use the "Include parent and child items of matching items" checkbox to get around this limitation (and issues like tags only being assigned to the parents).
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