Upgrade StoragePersistence of collapsed state of items
Hi, I'm just getting back into using Zotero after being away from it for about a year. It seems that one of the functionalities that used to exist is now different, and I'm not sure whether it was on purpose or I'm just missing something or what...
It used to be that when switching between collections, the items that were toggled to have their attachments visible (I'm not sure if "open" is the correct term, but I'll use it from now on) would remain open. Now, when you switch away from a collection and back to it, all items are collapsed, regardless of their previous state.
I found the persistence of opened items to be useful when working with multiple references, but now each time I go into another collection I have to remember and search for the items I was working on to re-toggle them (granted, not an exceedingly difficult task, but it happens very often and is relatively disruptive to my work flow).
Hopefully I'm just missing something, because I would love to have this functionality back!
It used to be that when switching between collections, the items that were toggled to have their attachments visible (I'm not sure if "open" is the correct term, but I'll use it from now on) would remain open. Now, when you switch away from a collection and back to it, all items are collapsed, regardless of their previous state.
I found the persistence of opened items to be useful when working with multiple references, but now each time I go into another collection I have to remember and search for the items I was working on to re-toggle them (granted, not an exceedingly difficult task, but it happens very often and is relatively disruptive to my work flow).
Hopefully I'm just missing something, because I would love to have this functionality back!
We could consider doing this, though. I think it would be too much state to store across restarts, so it would be limited to the current Zotero session. Were you imagining that the state would be per-collection-item or per-item? In other words, if you expand an item and switch to another collection where the item appears, would the item still be expanded?
In any case, it would be great if you considered implementing it! I didn't imagine it storing across restarts – I tend not to quit Zotero until I'm done with a task anyway. As for per-collection-item or per-item, I've tried to avoid much overlap in terms of having items in various collections, but I expect it to be more necessary for my current project. With that in mind and based on my use case, I would say that per-collection-item makes more sense. If I decide that an item should be in multiple collections, I would want them to expand/collapse independently of one another, as putting the item in two collections also reflects some sort of independence.
To give an example: If I'm writing an article about dogs and cats, I might have one reference ("Mammals") that addresses both dogs and cats. I would then put that item in both my "Dogs" collection and my "Cats" collection. In general, if I want to make sure that I use an item (or at least look at it again), I leave the item expanded so I can see all of its notes and other attachments at a glance; I collapse it if I change my mind or am finished with it. So in this example, assuming "Mammals" is a great reference for both animals, I would expand it in both collections. Then, if I were finished using it for cats but not dogs, I would want to be able to collapse it in Cats but leave it expanded in Dogs.
Sorry for the long-winded explanation :)