Please, allow a proper XML-export

andrei
Hi, I know that this topic is very old and that Zotero guys resist to make a complete XML-export. I am trying to export my academic references and post them in a nicely formatted way on a website of our university. It is not as easy as it could be, so I wonder why not to allow people to export all data in a good way? Is it because you want people to overload your website using third-party scanners? Or you think that having that feature folks will easily migrate from Zotero to something else?

It would be very nice to have complete data in XML-tree, including tags, collection etc. so me and other users could make a nice plugins and widgets for putting references etc. on our websites, and also generating BibTeX files!

I guess there is such data transfer between Firefox extension and Zotero server. Is it possible to use it?
  • noksagt
    edited May 4, 2010
    I don't know what you mean by "this topic is very old," as you are the first poster.

    Zotero already does export to a number of standardized and/or documented XML formats (MODS XML and a number of RDF-based ones).

    Zotero has also always had BibTeX export.
  • ajlyon
    For information on read-access to Zotero data via Zotero.org, see the discussion at http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-dev/browse_thread/thread/44abcdd1ac921593/965322f7f2bc6537 .

    The interface for fetching data from Zotero.org is not wholly documented or finalized, but as noksagt notes, there are copious output formats from Zotero (the locally-installed Firefox add-on), and it is fairly simple to implement additional export options.
  • andrei
    edited May 4, 2010
    Ok, I am probably not very advanced in XML, so cannot easily process structures like

    <content type="xhtml">
    <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <table>
    <tr class="itemType">
    <th style="text-align: right">Type</th>
    <td>Journal Article</td>
    </tr>

    I just thought that having <type>Journal Article</type> would make it simpler to process the data. Also, there is the number of item tags, but the tags are missing. Or I need to use another URL, not https://api.zotero.org/groups/12345/items ?

    Thanks for the links.

    update: Talking about BibTeX I meant that I would like to make it by myself from the XML data.
  • ajlyon
    You are looking in the right place. Not all data is currently available via api.zotero.org, but more is likely to be added.

    While you may not particularly like the format that Zotero uses to create its item feeds, it is regular and can be processed by anyone with a little experience in manipulating XML. No, it doesn't use the specific tags you would like to see, but there's no reason it ought to.
  • dstillman
    You can get an item's tags by appending /tags to the individual item request, e.g. https://api.zotero.org/groups/12345/items/123456789/tags. There are some other tag calls as well (and some additional ones coming) that will be documented when we release API documentation.

    That structure is very easy to parse (though, in the case of item type, it should probably include the canonical name "journalArticle" somewhere as well). If you're having trouble, try an XML forum or a forum for whatever tool you're using to parse it.
  • andrei
    I am a bit confusing. I am asking about item tags (not XML), like "physics" etc. Can you tell when they will be accessible? They can be handy for sorting...
  • ajlyon
    See https://api.zotero.org/groups/12345/items/122694169/tags for tags, per Dan's comment.

    My reference to "specific tags" was because you seemed dissatisfied with having the markup used in the API results, even though it was easily traversed with basic XPath expressions.

    Also, Dan, the canonical item type is in <zapi:itemType>newspaperArticle</zapi:itemType> already.
  • dstillman
    Also, Dan, the canonical item type is in newspaperArticle already.
    Ah, that's right.
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