iOS - Webdav - Unable to display document

Hello,

I currently have the Zotero beta app on iOS, synced to a personal webdav server, along with the Zotero Desktop beta app on an Ubuntu machine.

I am having troubles opening one specific file on my iPad. When I try to download it from the webdav server, the loading wheel starts to load but then the PDF Viewer opens and it says "Unable to display document". All other files work OK. I have tried long-pressing the item and "Removing Download", but the problem persists with that specific file.

I uploaded a debug log (id D1479656925), where I do the following things:
* I "Remove Download" from two different items, one of them the failing one (FluSense paper)
* I download both of the files. One of them works, the other doesn't.
* I repeat the steps.

Please let me know if I there's anything else I can help to solve this. Thanks!
  • If you download 2P67JVXN.zip from your WebDAV server and unzip it, is there a PDF inside, and can you open it?

    If you don't mind sending it to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread, that might help us figure out what's going on.
  • edited November 23, 2021
    Done, thanks.


    Edit: ugh, attachment too large. Let me upload it somewhere else.
  • And just to confirm, that's the file that you can't open via the app, correct?
  • edited November 23, 2021
    @matiaslaporte: Is the file you sent the actual name of the file within the ZIP? (Sorry, I was actually asking for the ZIP file itself, not the PDF, but that was unclear.)

    The attachment in your database points to a different, longer filename based on the metadata, so if you didn't manually rename the file, the iOS may be getting confused between the filename in the database and the filename in the ZIP. (It should handle that, but it might not.)

    If you renamed the file before sending it to us, the problem would be something else.
  • edited November 23, 2021
    Oh, I realized you did upload the ZIP and the site was just showing the contents. So the filename is different. Do you know how that happened? Seems like this is probably the original filename before Zotero renamed it. Did you add this file on the desktop?

    It should handle this in any case so we’ll investigate.
  • @dstillman Yes, I added the PDF on the desktop app, and then retrieved the metadata in order to create the item with the PDF attached to it. From Zotero, if I do "Show file", it correctly goes to the storage/2P67JVXN/ folder, and the folder name matches the zip file. The original filename probably was 3381014.pdf, or FluSense.pdf (disregarding the lower/upper case).

    From the iPad side, I don't know if it helps (from what you are saying it's the problem, I think it won't) but just in case, I first tried to download the file on a train with a mobile hotspot, so it was a sketchy connection. I thought perhaps there was some corrupted semi-downloaded file, so I removed the download, cleared the cache, restarted the iPad, several times, but that didn't worked.

    I am not sure if perhaps uploading some logs from the Desktop may help?
  • edited November 23, 2021
    It's OK. I think probably what happened is that you downloaded the file without metadata, it was uploaded to WebDAV within the ZIP as FluSense.pdf, you retrieved metadata (which renamed the file), but then it was never reuploaded with the new filename for some reason. The desktop client handles that automatically — if there's a single file within the ZIP that doesn't match the DB, it renames the file to match — but the iOS app might just not do that yet. We'll fix.

    (For now, you can either ignore this, re-add the file, or open the PDF in an external PDF reader and add some temporary annotation to trigger a reupload.)
  • I confirm that adding an annotation in an external PDF reader fixes the issue, thanks!
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