External call for "save to Zotero"?

I am looking for a way to hand over a URL to either Zotero standalone or the browser plugin so that the "save to zotero" function is triggered directly without user interaction.
The background: I have a database application that generates a URL of which I already know it displays data the user wants in his/her Zotero library.
Pressing a button in my app (a FileMaker application running on Windows or MacOS) should activate Zotero just in the same way as if the user had clicked the zotero button in the browser.
Any chance to do that?
  • This isn't quite what you're asking for, but if you use syncing, the simplest option would be to use the online save page. We haven't gotten around to announcing it, but you can append ?q=https://example.com/foo/bar to pass a URL serving either a webpage or a metadata file in a supported format (RIS, BibTeX, etc.). (Technically the passed URL should be percent-encoded, but if it doesn't have a query string of its own that's likely not necessary.) If you use auto-sync, the saved item should appear in your local library within a few seconds.

    The main downside to this approach is that it requires clicking save on the webpage, but I can't really think of another option for you at the moment that wouldn't be considerably more complicated (e.g., with scripting involved).
  • Dan, you are my hero! You just saved me from days if not weeks of work trying to mend the broken link between Litlink (https://www.litlink.ch/en/about-litlink/) and Zotero, and the solution is even better than I thought, because it shows the user what was found and asks for the library to store the item in.
    I can now finally bury our own retrieval mechanism that only ever worked for selected catalogues anyway and instead concentrate on improvements in the way we use the Zotero API.
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