Sync error once you have impeorted from Mendeley

oscar.delatorre.torres
Hi,
I'm new in Zotero, and I'm considering changing from Mendeley, but I've been disappointed.

Once I imported my library from mendeley, I made my first sync but it this error appears:
Annotation text 'trust and ethics 4.1...' is too long for attachment BC4ZGE4G.

I can't use the I phone pdf reader (and assume neither the web library's one) because my library isn't synced correctly.

I have the 285026404 report and it says that I must report it here in the forums (????)

How can I solve this issue and use correctly Zotero in my iPhone and all my devices. That is why I'm considering changing to Zotero but it seems to have issues working.
  • dstillman
    We can fix this, though it likely indicates a problem with the annotation in your Mendeley database.

    First, go to Tools → Developer → Run JavaScript, paste the following code, and let us know the result:

    Zotero.Items.getByLibraryAndKey(1, 'BC4ZGE4G').getAnnotations().map(x => x.annotationText.length)

    Then go back to your library root, paste "BC4ZGE4G" into the Zotero search bar in All Fields & Tags mode, double-click the PDF that shows up, open the left-hand sidebar of the PDF reader, and look for the annotation with highlighted text beginning with "trust and ethics". Is that a huge annotation cover lots of text on the page? If you double-click on the annotation text in the sidebar, does the text that shows up match the highlighted text, or is it much longer?
  • oscar.delatorre.torres
    Dear dstillman,

    Thanks for your fast answer. I tried what you did. When I ran the java script, this message appeared: TypeError: x.annotationText is null.
    Following your suggestion that it could be a sort of Mendeley issue and, therefore, a migration problem, I searched BC4ZGE4G in my online library and deleted it from the library and the library's waste basket.

    I believe that it was a storage issue. My original Mendeley library has 3.1 GB, and I paid for the 2 GB subscription. I upgraded, along with the previous steps and mi Zotero (online, desktop, and iPhone) is working.

    With that, I solved the issue, and my Zotero is working.

    I hope these steps can help other users.

    Thanks for your help.
  • dstillman
    edited August 24, 2022
    No, nothing to do with storage. It was an annotation for which the highlighted text was way too long, likely due to a problem parsing the PDF. We don't allow annotation text that long to sync, since it's always a mistake. We're planning to make a change that will automatically correct this in the future just by truncating the text.

    For what it's worth, if you bother to post here and we suggest a troubleshooting step and there's a problem with it, it's much better if you just come back and tell us, rather than doing something completely different. (You also didn't answer any of my questions.) Obviously just deleting the item would fix this, but part of the point here was to determine how this happened in the first place.
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