Bug: Selecting multiple tags and choosing delete only removes one

mronkko
When I select multiple tags with the tag selector at bottom left and choose delete tag, the software only deletes the tag on which I clicked the right mouse button. I would expect it to delete all tags that I have chosen or to highlight only one tag when I press the right mouse button. Deleting multiple tags would be a better option for me.

Additionally, deleting tags from a large library (4600 entries) is very slow.

Mikko
  • noksagt
    edited March 19, 2009
    To delete a tag, you have to right click directly on it & deletion works when the tag is unselected. Furthermore, the interface says "delete tag" rather than "delete tags." While I'm not opposed to allowing multiple tags to be deleted, I disagree with you that this is a but & I find the current behavior to be expected and consistent.
  • mronkko
    What I mean when I say that deleting tags is slow is that when I delete a tag from my large library, the software freezes for a second or two.

    To clean my tags faster, I went to delete them from the database. The idea was to first delete all unnecessary tags from tags and then clean up itemtags with one sql query.

    Before doing any modifications, I explored the database a bit. Running the following query listed all the tags that I had just deleted.

    SELECT * FROM tags where tagID not in (select distinct tagID from itemtags)

    Is leaving these orphaned tags in the database by design or is it a bug?

    Mikko
  • dstillman
    It's by design. If you're using 1.5, orphaned tags are deleted the next time you open the Zotero pane.
  • mronkko
    It indeed removes the orphaned tags when I reopen the zotero pane. Just out of curiosity: Why does it work like that?

    Mikko
  • dstillman
    Because tag purging is a slow operation on larger libraries, and this allows purges from multiple deletions to be done by the same command. Pane open isn't necessarily the best time to do it, but there aren't a lot of great times to potentially freeze Firefox. (On idle might be best, as long as the user doesn't return, so we might change it to do that at some point.)
  • mronkko
    Deleting tags is very slow with my database. It takes 5 to 10 seconds to delete a tag. I have 4600 articles in the database and rougly 3000 tags.

    Removing a single tag results in approximately a thousand SQL queries.

    I posted the log with debug level 5 here

    http://rafb.net/p/NqIsxL53.html

    There is probably some room for optimizing the code here ;)

    Mikko

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