Manually adding author is extremely slow and causes background activities to hang
Report ID: 1342449427
When I add an Author, whether to a record that has been imported or manually created, entering the name of an Author and pressing return causes Zotero to go away for a really long time, and the "+" icon to add another author remains greyed out. Furthermore, if anything else is done to the record (e.g., editing abstract, adding a date etc.) whatever was done since the Author addition was triggered is lost (i.e., it is as if there are two competing background edit activities).
Steps to reproduce:
1. Create or select a record
2. Enter text in the author field and press return
3. The author column remains unpopulated for a really long time, and the icon to add another author remains greyed out
When I add an Author, whether to a record that has been imported or manually created, entering the name of an Author and pressing return causes Zotero to go away for a really long time, and the "+" icon to add another author remains greyed out. Furthermore, if anything else is done to the record (e.g., editing abstract, adding a date etc.) whatever was done since the Author addition was triggered is lost (i.e., it is as if there are two competing background edit activities).
Steps to reproduce:
1. Create or select a record
2. Enter text in the author field and press return
3. The author column remains unpopulated for a really long time, and the icon to add another author remains greyed out
This is instantaneous in my reasonably large library.
Actions:
1. selected record
2. added author
3. waited for greyed out '+' icon to come back - observed that addition had failed
4. added author again
5. worked this time (after some time)
Do you have any items with a very large number (hundreds or thousands) of creators?
If you go to Tools → Developer → Run JavaScript and run the following command, what's the output?
return await Zotero.DB.valueQueryAsync("SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT creatorID) FROM creators JOIN itemCreators USING (creatorID) JOIN items USING (itemID) WHERE libraryID=1") + " " + await Zotero.DB.valueQueryAsync("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM creators")
Can you provide a Debug ID just for typing "Smith" in the Last field and waiting for the autocomplete results to appear, and then pressing Esc without saving anything? (It might take 30 or more seconds.)
Yes, there are some items with large numbers of items (since some papers from consortia insist on including every member as an author).
The query returns 280059.
The DebugID for the action requested is D183924156, though the autocomplete on Last did not take very long before returning a list of suggestions (as distinct from finishing the entry and waiting for the "+" add another author icon to ungrey) - it seems to be to be the author insertion action that is taking a while, not the autocomplete suggestion list generation.
David
PS. I can live without autocomplete on the authors, if there is a way to turn it off.
If you think it's slow after that, we'd want to see a Debug ID that shows you waiting to enter the author until only "smith" results have appeared, which, again, might take 30 or more seconds. You can just wait a minute after typing "smith" to be safe.
Action was to add an author, wait the 15-20 seconds till "+" was re-enabled, and add two more authors in the same manner.
Try D1842553952.
We'll look into this.