ZotDroid - A Zotero Client for Android

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  • Its one of these things you'd *think* was already implemented, but the issue is they only go two layers deep :/ Not enough really. It may be possible to hack one together - I don't know. It's certainly worth looking into but I can't make any guarantees which is why I've left it until now.
    Thanks for the link. I had a quick look and I expect this has the same issue. But rest assured it's definitely on the cards for me to fix.
  • It keeps on crashing after updates. That forces me to reinstall, reconfigure, etc. Otherwise it's improving and I feel very grateful.
  • @fmuro if you uninstall it completely then reinstall does it work fine?

    The reasons for this is always that we've had a large database change. The group libraries have caused drastic changes in the codebase so an upgrade option was never really going to work at all.

    I've had a thought regards the collections - a sliding set of list views. I think this is the general way it works on Android I think. I suspect this is worth investigating.
  • Hello everybody!

    Version 0.93 is now out! The main change? Better left hand collection support. Rather than go old-school with a tree layout, I've decided to go a bit more modern and use transitions instead! It seems more like what the designers of the Android UX would have had in mind.

    Again, there are large changes, so please remove and then add again.

    Group libraries are now supported.

    I'm going to focus on cosmetics and bug fixes. The next large release will be the official, paid for product v1.0! :) Exciting!
  • edited January 4, 2018
    just to say, thanks for this. i'm very grateful that someone is finally working on an android client!
    a quick question: are you planning to add the ability to get bibliographic references from the items/collections? (and apologies if this has been asked before)
  • Thanks! It's taken a lot of time and quite frankly, it's very boring code to write. I'd much rather be learning Rust and working on AI and computer graphics but theres a need for something like this I think.

    To that end, v1.0 will be a paid-for product, likely not very expensive. Now is your chance to get small feature request in early! :)
  • I've been using zotdroid since the very early releases, and it's come a long way!
    main features i need are ability to get spit out bib refs (as above) and to add items from an android browser.
    Again, many thanks!
  • Hi there. I think that both of these features are pretty big but might be ones I'd add in the future. I suspect adding from a browser would be a separate program entirely and wouldn't really involve zotdroid, unless you started pasting links which would suck from a UX perspective. Still, I've written these down for the future :) Cheers
  • @henge -- for adding items from browser, see if https://www.zotero.org/downloadbookmarklet works. It should in general, but I'm not 100% sure of its status on android and haven't tested for a while.
  • edited January 5, 2018
    Thanks for that @adamsmith I'm giving it a whirl...
    On another note @OniDaito I'm having trouble connecting to webdav (connection failed)...
    Settings as follows https://webdav.cloudme.com/[username]/xios/zotero/
    Any thoughts?
  • @henge Interesting. Make sure the 'use personal webdav' setting is flipped, otherwise it will assume zotero storage and fail.
  • Flipped the personal setting, but no joy.
    On a different, but sort of related note, I sync all my Zotero folders/articles to my Android storage via dropbox. Is there anyway to link to this local storage?
  • @henge oh thats a shame. Presumably it's basic http auth with a properly signed cert? I can't think of any other reason for that to fail. Is there an error message?

    You can set the location where ZotDroid saves it's PDFs in general settings. It will load and save at this location. If that directory happens to be a dropbox one, then it should all work fine.
  • edited January 10, 2018
    Hi OniDaito. Thanks for the app!

    But for me it does not work properly. If I try to open an attachment, I get an error like this:

    Error: Attachment download error. https://api.zotero.org/users/myuserid/items/ZFPDC7GV/file

    My settings are the following:
    User ID: myuserid
    User Key: myuserkey
    Font Size: blank
    User Secret: myuserkey
    Download Location: blank
    Database Location: blank

    I do not use a external webdav server.

    Could you please help me?

    Thanks!
  • @tobsto I get the same error...
    I've set my downloads folder to street to the 'storage' folder where all the pdfs are (in sub folders named in the Zotero way), but still nothing.
    Cheers all
  • Hello all.
    So I've been away for a bit working hard on my research. Thought I'd come back to this.
    The error is because the download API as written might not be correct. It works for external storage but not for the Zotero style storage.
    I've fixed this in the next version - it appears to work now at this end. Thanks for letting me know. I wonder if this is due to a recent change in the API perhaps?
    Anyway I'll be publishing version 1.0 very soon.
  • please post to zotero-dev with any issues with the Zotero API:
    https://www.google.com/search?q=zotero-dev+group&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
  • It's likely I read it wrong if I'm honest. I made the assumption that the API_BASE + "/users/" + USER_ID + "/items/" + ITEM_KEY + "/file" would work for Zotero Official WebDav storage (it doesn't) so I suspect I've missed something.

    Anyway, I've fixed it now. Sadly, downloading the file directly does not give me a "Content-Length" HTML header field, so users can't see how much they have to download which is a shame. But nevermind :)
  • Hi there, tried running Zotdroid on my Samsung S7 - I'm guessing that it's more powerful than my tablet. Zotdroid still keeps choking on me. I've sent through a couple of error reports, hope they help.
  • Hi all
    I've been off the zotdroid train for a little while - my research has hit a tricky point so I've not had too much time.
    I've got one more version to put out which I'll hopefully do later today or tomorrow.
    It's close to the v1.0 release version now, with a new URL, Icon and all the rest. I'm spending some time smoothing off all the sharp edges, particularly with the UI and what not. Please bear with me for a short time whilst I get things ready.
    Cheers
    Ben
  • Hello all!
    So here is the 0.95 release

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=computer.benjamin.zotdroid

    I was going to go straight to version 1.0 with the new rebranding but instead, here is one more beta version before go into the first release mode. It has the new URL (my business / professional output) hence the new name and new app.

    Do remove the older version. Eventually, this older version with the blue icon will be removed.

    This version still sends bug reports. I'll probably need to remove that once this app is properly released.

    Cheers
    Ben
  • Minor fix - v0.96 is now the current.
    Cheers
    B
  • sent through some new bug reports. I still can't select folders without the app crashing. I suspect my database is just too big for a (and it's not like there are a lot of more powerful phones than my S7) phone or tablet to handle.
  • @"Jon Rubin" thanks for the feedback. Honestly, I've designed zotdroid to cope with the biggest libraries so I doubt thats the problem - I really do. The things I suspect might cause issues are:

    1) You've run out of internal memory and the sqlite database grows too large
    2) the net connection breaks leaving you in a mixed up state
    3) The number of collections at the top most level exceeds these that android natively supports.

    My suspicion is that it is 1 which I can fix by putting in checks to 'guess' the size of the database before it is downloaded. It's not the best but it might help.

    I'll look over the error reports this week as I should see the error you are gettting if you are connected to the net.

    Cheers
    B
  • Next version is out - 0.97

    Minor bug fixes and some extra UX work

    @"Jon Rubin" If you can, could you furnish me with a bit more information on your collection at all? I'm keen to make sure this works with the largest collections. I've added a check for database sizing so hopefully we can detect problem (1)
  • @OniDaito sure - what do you need to know?
    I've got 8,300 top level items
    database size of zotero.sqlite is 67,6MB
    I'm also the owner of five group libraries
    anything else you need to know?
  • @"Jon Rubin" Thanks! Can you confirm that upon a crash, a little 'toast' message appears saying 'sending crash report'?

    As I understand the problem is when you switch collections correct? Does this occur on group collections, local collections or both?

    I noticed a couple of bugs that I've quashed in the meatime. My suspicion was that some of your collection items might be odd, or rather, I'm getting errors when I pull them down from Zotero. Can't be sure but I'm keeping my eyes peeled on it.
  • @OniDaito To @ users with spaces in their names, you need to use %20 for space and write them as @Jon%20Rubin. The autocomplete on the forums is wrong here.
  • @OniDaito I really should be in the habit of giving better crash reports :)

    All I've been trying to do so far is select my Local collection and then a top level folder in my Local collection.

    Just tried to do it again, and yes I got / have been getting a crash report screen -
    (just sent another one through).

    I can then select a folder from my Local collection that's got 36 items in it but if I then try and Order by Author, I can get another crash. Actually take that back, that just worked. [realise this is going slightly Proustian]

    But then I tried to back out of a local folder and Zotdroid completely crashed - I saw the 'toast' message pop up, but then the app quit completely.

    hmm, just noticed that when you do an author sort, it sorts by all creators, including editors - you may want to change the descriptor to 'creator sort' in that case.

    Selecting a Group Folder doesn't seem to cause a crash (crosses fingers) but when I swipe the folder selection pane back, I'm not immediately seeing the top level items of that group. But apart from that Group folders (which are *much* smaller than my main Local folder) seem to be behaving well.

    Quick question: when you first start up Zotdroid, does it default to your Local collection?

  • It's great that you are working in this - it would be amazing to have mobile integration for Android!

    Did you post the code on github? It seems so, but this link doesn't work https://github.com/OniDaito/ZotDroid/releases ...

    Thanks!
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