Quick search of child attachments to tag parent items

fbennett
I may be missing something obvious, but I've been unable to find an option or a thread, so here goes.

I want to tag up a bunch of content based on quick searches of item attachments. The content is in a group, so using Advanced Search is not an option. Saved searches are too awkward given the scale of the work needed.

Quick search of the group works great with "Everything" selected in the quick-search box, but the parent items can't be tagged (or dragged to a temporary collection) when the search doesn't hit them directly (they are greyed out).

In Advanced Search (or in a saved search) we have the "Include parent and child items of matching items" option, and that's the effect I'd like to achieve. Is there a way of forcing Quick Search to include parent items when there is a search hit on its child? I'll hack an option into the Search panel in MLZ if I have to, but it's possible I'm just missing something.
  • dstillman
    the parent items can't be tagged (or dragged to a temporary collection) when the search doesn't hit them directly (they are greyed out).
    Shouldn't be anything stopping you from tagging or dragging grayed-out items. Both work for me.
  • fbennett
    edited February 17, 2013
    Drag and drop works fine for individual greyed-out items, but the drop fails when items are selected and dragged as a batch from the center panel. I was working in MLZ, but I've just run a test with Zotero 3.0.13, and I get the same behaviour there.

    While puzzling over it, I added a fourth option "Everything by families" to the quick search drop-down a few minutes ago. It just replicates the conditions of "Everything" and turns on the "includeParentsAndChildren" search condition. With the new option, select and drag works fine for our use case. I can post the patch to GitHub if the option might be useful to others.
  • dstillman
    Multiple items work fine for me too.
  • fbennett
    Aha, I see. When the view is expanded, a selection that includes parents and children will not drop. If the view is collapsed before selecting, the drop works.
  • dstillman
    That's still not related to searching. Even with parents and children selected you can still drag to tags. Matches vs. non-matches shouldn't have any effect here—that's purely styling.

    Not being able to drag to collections when child items are selected is by design, since it would give the impression that you could drag child items independently to collections. There's an open ticket to allow the drag when all of an item's child items are selected, though.

    (This also isn't related to expanded vs. collapsed, except to the extent that that affects what you select.)
  • fbennett
    Right, got it. The interface is fine, it just took me a few passes to figure out the constraints. You can close this thread.
  • fbennett
    (To confirm, I realised after posting that the "includeParentsAndChidren" toggle was irrelevant to the drop behaviour, as you say.)

This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Before commenting here, you should strongly consider starting a new discussion instead. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.

This discussion has been closed.