What does "sync full-text content" do?

shucwu
I got a pop-up alert today on my desktop (which had firefox running) asking if I want to enable this new feature. However, I have been unable to find any information on it in both the documentations and the forums other than the brief description on the pop-out. Could someone explain it in greater details? I already sync attachment files in my library using zotero. What do I gain by syncing full-text contents?
  • RintzeRintze
    For now, there is a (rather) technical description at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zotero-dev/i3fu9q4kn8c
  • elizwood
    Could someone explain the pros and cons of this kind of full-text syncing? For starters, what does "full text" mean? And then, on the pro side, what would be the benefits? Are the texts actually different? What kinds of texts are most affected? Or is the benefit in the syncing across devices? How would that be different from the current set-up? And on the con side, what might be the increased time to download, the risk of crashing, and other costs?
  • adamsmith
    Full text: The text content of indexed attachments, i.e. PDFs and html files.

    pros:
    - you can search full text online at zotero.org and -once implemented - in apps based on the Zotero API (e.g. mobile apps).
    - full text search works uniformly across synced devices (which isn't currently the case - you need to manually re-trigger indexing on synced computers).

    cons:
    - really should all be quite minimal - these are plain text, so after the initial sync the size is tiny. Can't tell you about crashes but there is no reason to believe it'd cause any.
  • Gracile
    The text content of indexed attachments
    That's a clear description. In the French version, I've slightly modified the message to make it clearer (hopefully). But, generally speaking, I think that the Prefs pane should have more links to the online documentation (ideally, these links would be localized and the wiki would automatically forward to the English article if the localized does not exist - I think this has been discussed in the past).

    BTW, the tooltip is pretty useless. Who's going to put his mouse over the checkbox *to get an explanation* ? In ZotFile, tooltips are indicated by a small "i" icon.

    [and "sync full-text content" is somewhat jargony, no ? "Full-text cache" too... (In French, it is ; probably different in English?)]
  • b0c5
    What is the difference between sync full-text context and syncing file attachmetns?
  • adamsmith
    full-text content syncs the index that allows for full text _search_, not the actual files and vice versa (file sync w/o full-text content sync means file content is only included in searches on the computer where it was originally added).
  • sdspieg
    But so are the cached full texts in shared (private) groups available via API?
  • adamsmith
    why wouldn't they be? The documentation explicitly refers to "UserOrGroupPrefix"
  • sdspieg
    So can you please give an example of a GET request for all fields (including the cached text) for all items a shared Group?
  • adamsmith
    you can´t get that in a single request; you´d have to script it -- not sure what the best approach would be -- might just be to run through the library, get the child item IDs and then query individually for their full text context and match that to the parent item.
  • sdspieg
    edited September 12, 2018
    I'm sorry to ask this again, but we keep banging our heads against the wall on this one and don't seem to be making any headway. Could anybody please help us with making such a (functioning) script?
  • adamsmith
    post to zotero-dev with exactly what format you need this in and what you have so far (that 2nd part is important -- you're much more likely to get help if you're looking for a solution to a specific roadblock rather than asking people to write you a script). Most people would probably code this in python and that also has one of the better API libraries, so that'd probably the scripting language of choice if possible, but obviously the API is language independent.
    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/zotero-dev
  • sdspieg
    Ok - we'll do. I've asked Olga to share what she has done, and we'll post that there.
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