Unable to edit an existing citation or add a citation in MSWord documents

cresencia
Hi,

I've been using the zotero plugin for MSWord 2011 (for Mac, OS 10.6.8) - to add citations and edit existing citations.

Now, I'm getting an error message anytime I try to edit an existing citation or add a new one. The error message reads:

"Zotero experienced an error updating your document. citations[j - 1)'.sortedItems.slice(...)[0] is defined"

Please help!
Cresencia
  • aurimas
    Please submit a Report ID as per https://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_problems
  • cresencia
    Report ID: 314360296

    Restarting my laptop doesn't fix the problem.

    The error message appear anytime I am using MSWord, and access Zotero via the Word plugin to: (1) edit an existing Zotero-created citation in my Word document, or (2) try to add a new citation in a Word document.
  • aurimas
    Is this affecting only one document? Is everything working ok in a new document? If other documents are not affected, see if this helps https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents (you already did step 7)
  • cresencia
    This only affects one document. From the link you sent me, I noticed #2 - "Check for citations in image captions. Zotero won't let you insert them, but if you copied a citation to a caption that's most likely the source of the problem. Delete it."

    I did find 1 citation in an image caption and deleted it. Thereafter, if I tried to add or edit a citation in the document, Zotero was unresponsive and no Zotero toolbar/field would pop up.

    After restarting my computer, and then trying to edit or add a citation to the same document, the same pop-up error (as per my root message in this thread) would appear.
  • adamsmith
    You'll want to run through step 8/9 then.
  • cresencia
    I did do steps 8-9, on a duplicate of my document. I was able to find the 1 citation that seemed to be the problem (i.e. removal of that 1 citation allowed me to once again add new citations and edit existing ones).

    However, when I removed the same citation from my original document, the same original error message came up. Restarting my computer did not solve this.
  • adamsmith
    Any reason you can't use the copy of the document?
  • cresencia
    The reason I can't use the duplicate is because step 8 involves deleting half of the document at a time. So that's what I've done with the duplicate, and now it's missing the majority of the text. Also, after restarting the computer, and returning to the duplicate (where I thought I had isolated and deleted the faulty citation) - I started to get the same error message. So I had to repeat step 8 on a brand new duplicate file of the original document - and found a different faulty citation.

    None of this makes any sense at all.

    I'm starting to think that I should remove all the field codes from the 90-page document, and then re-insert the citations all over again.

    Unless you have any better ideas?
  • aurimas
    It is possible that you have more than one faulty citation (it's also possible that all of the citations got corrupted). So once you find one of the citations, correct it, and go through the steps again. If you find that you need to do this more than 2-3 times, it might be easier to just re-insert all citations.

    In either case, it would probably be useful for us to take a look at the document you are editing to figure out what could have gone wrong. If you do not mind sharing the document with Zotero developers, you could email it to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    cresencia: To figure out what happened here, we'd want to see the original document, not the version with the problematic citations removed. (But from your email, it's not clear to me if you're still having trouble after removing these two citations?)
  • cresencia
    Yes, I'm still having trouble, even after removing those 2 citations - so that first file I sent to you was a problematic file.

    I've now also sent the original problematic file, with no citation removed.

    Again, please don't share my files to anyone outside of your zotero developer group.

    Thanks for any solutions you (hopefully) can come up with!
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    OK, so the issue actually isn't the citations you pointed out, but the problematic citations are right next to those, which is why you thought that. Do a Select All in the document, right click on the text, and choose Toggle Field Codes. Then do a search for those two citations you replaced and look at the sentence before them — which appears in both places in the document (so likely copy-and-pasted). You'll see a shaded section (beginning with "ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM") with much less code in it than all the others, with citationID "EldV1ELa". Delete that whole gray section, making sure there's no gray from it left behind. If you do that in both places, the problem should go away (assuming there are no other corrupted citations like this). You can then Select All again and Toggle Field Codes again to switch back to the formatted citations.

    We'll look into how this happened.
  • cresencia
    THANK-YOU!!!! Yes, this fixed the problem!

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