Translator tutorial?

braumagazin · October 23, 2017

I would like to start writing an Import translator. Is there, beside the description on the Zotero Page, somewhere a tutorial?
Are the Import translators also used by the Zotero standalone app?
What is the best way to test a translator?

bwiernik · October 23, 2017

The import translators are used by the standalone app. It’s best to post development questions like this to the Zotero-dev listserv:
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/zotero-dev

adamsmith · October 23, 2017

Also depends on what exactly you mean by "import" translators. If you just mean general Zotero translators to import stuff from websites, this documentation is excellent and up to date:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Citoid/Creating_Zotero_translators

If you mean import translators in the technical sense of the word as used by Zotero, i.e. for importing from metadata formats, the best way is to look at existing translators & the Zotero documentation.

braumagazin · October 24, 2017

Thanks for the answers. Yes, I mean a "real" import translator for metadata files like the one for bibtex. The docs are actually kind of confusing since they are in most cases based on Zotero 4 and the firefox plugin. I think I will use the API instead to create a standalone translator. The API documentation seems to be complete and up-to-date.

adamsmith · October 24, 2017

There's actually no real difference between writing a translator for Zotero 4 and 5 -- they're still individual javascript files in the translator directory and the syntax hasn't changed (Zotero 4 existed als Standalone, too)

Scaffold should just work for import translators in Zotero Standalone (otherwise you can build the newest version from the github repository).

You can obviously ingest via API and if this is just for you, it probably doesn't make a giant difference, but for any other users, using the API will typically require using some sort of script (presumably you'd wrap the API calls in a python script or the like) which in my experience is a pretty big obstacle for regular end-users.