Upgrade Storagebetter handling of unfiled items
I have been saving items and then going back to file them later. unfortunately, if they're in "my library", I can't quickly tell which ones are filed, but I can go through with CTRL to check one by one. that's terribly slow if I have more than a few new items to file!
I've created an "unfiled" search with "not in" criteria for each collection, but this is a kludge -- I shouldn't need to create it, and then I have to modify it whenever I add or change collections. (It also took me a long time to realize that it doesn't work properly unless I select "only show top-level items".)
This "unfiled" collection should be a default, and there should be some simple way of highlighting or otherwise marking unfiled items in my library (should I choose to mark them).
I've created an "unfiled" search with "not in" criteria for each collection, but this is a kludge -- I shouldn't need to create it, and then I have to modify it whenever I add or change collections. (It also took me a long time to realize that it doesn't work properly unless I select "only show top-level items".)
This "unfiled" collection should be a default, and there should be some simple way of highlighting or otherwise marking unfiled items in my library (should I choose to mark them).
This makes me think that you could create your unfiled search the way I created my untagged search. It's a kludge which I hope we won't always need, but the instructions are here. You'll laugh when you read it, and it takes a while to set up, but it works for untagged items.
1. A single, downloadable manual containing all the more-detailed instructions could be useful. I could not locate one on the Zotero site. (I ploughed through all I could find, and asembled them into one PDF for myself.)
2. Colleen presented the example of prior research on 3 X 5 cards. My situation is a pile of research (mostly .pdfs) in folders.
a. One problem is that some of my .PDFs are so old they lack metadata.
b. The objective is to move them to Zotero, not copy them in Zotero.
3. Finding/listing untagged items would be useful for clean-up tasks, but I find that the ticket for this is around three years old. (I mentioned this once before on this forum.) It would seem that the selection query (Items_With_No_Tags) would be (For Zotero 1.0):
SELECT items.itemID, items.itemTypeID
FROM items LEFT JOIN itemTags ON items.itemID = itemTags.itemID
WHERE (((itemTags.itemID) Is Null));
Building the output list depends upon the table definitions and relationships, which I have not had time to trace.
I've managed to have a workaround though, which works ok for me. That's probably because I work with sub sub-sub and sub-sub-sub-collections a lot and don't change the top level collections folders a lot.
Here is how I did it:
Just add a saved search, name it "not filed" and
- select: find with all of the following
- add a search entry for every top-level collection: Select: Collection - is not - your-top level-collection-name
- check all three options below (sub-directories, just elements in first level, include all levels)
Should work fine now, if you don't add new top-level-collections every day.
Dennis
Thank you so much for posting this workaround, a feature like this has been on my wishlist for about a year now and somehow I missed the "subfolders" search option. I have only 4 top level collections, which are very stable, but almost 200 subcollections within those so this is a perfect workaround for me. Now I just have to work out where to file the 122 lost and unfiled items your method has revealed!
For people who have a larger number of top level collections, or a more fluid top level collection list an extension to this workaround would be to make all current top-level collections subcollections of a single top level collection (by drag-and-drop). This is slightly less smooth (as it results in a superfluous level of nesting) but it should work alright AFAIK.
Thank you. It's my pleasure.
Take care,
Dennis
A pity though that one has to resort to such tricks.
Anyway... I'd like the Context menu to include not only the Create note, selection but too include another that will direct the newly created item to certain "Favorite Folders" within the library. I think a list of ten would be a good default number.
It would be>>>Zotero>>Create Note>>>Send to Folder 1-2-3-4-ABC-DFG-etc
This will be available in 2.1b7, which should be out within the next few days.