Error message when trying to auto cite from Amazon

forest
Hi there,

I've looked through the forum and can't find anything on this: I keep getting an error message when I click on the blue book in the url bar to create an auto citation of a book on an amazon page:

'Could not save item. An error occurred while saving this item. Please try again. If the error persists, contact the translator author."

Is it operator difficulty, or is this a bug?

This looks like a great tool. Hope I can get the auto citation thing working. This would help out a lot!

Best wishes,
Forest
  • dstillman
    edited November 24, 2006
    It looks like the updated Amazon translator we released yesterday may suffer from the same problem that some people are seeing on PubMed, resulting in "Could not save item" errors. The problem seems to be in E4X (i.e. native XML support in JS) calls within the translators, but unfortunately, as with PubMed, we haven't been able to reproduce the problem ourselves, which makes it rather difficult to debug.

    EDIT: Could you (or anyone else experiencing this) try creating a new Firefox profile, copying over the 'zotero' data directory from your old profile, and installing Zotero in the new profile?

    Also, out of curiosity, did you use a beta version of Firefox 2.0 before upgrading to the final version?
  • dstillman
    edited November 24, 2006
    As noted in the PubMed thread, this is now fixed. Your copy of Zotero should auto-repair within the next 24 hours. (We'll have a manual update button in the next release. If you're particularly impatient you can close Firefox, run "DELETE FROM version WHERE schema='lastcheck'" in zotero.sqlite, and restart.)

    Let us know if you continue to have problems after 4 p.m. EST Saturday.
  • smock
    I did a search on "Amazon" and found this thread. As of 11/27 I am still getting the error described above when I try to click on the blue citation icon next to the URL in Amazon. Let me know if you need any additional information. Thanks!
  • dstillman
    There may have still been an issue with the Amazon translator in the repository. Please try again, and let us know if it's still not working by 6 p.m. EST Tuesday.
  • smock
    10:30 EST, and I'm afraid I'm still getting the same error. Is there any way I can check what version of the Amazon translator I have, so I can confirm I'm running the fixed version? Thanks for your help!

    P.S. It's probably peculiar to my setup (although I don't know what it could be), but the controls for posting to this forum don't display properly in my FF 2.0. I have to fire up IETab to get it to work.
  • sean
    Please note that if you're trying to import any item other than a book, the Amazon translator will fail. Our next beta release will include a new translator that supports other Amazon media types.
  • smock
    That's good to know, although I've been trying this book in my tests.
  • michaelschiltz
    Same problem here; could it have to do with Firefox-languages other than English (I am using the Japanese version)?

    Apart from that, great tool indeed!
  • dstillman
    Sorry if you're still having issues with the Amazon translator. We're not sure what the issue is, as we can't reproduce the problem ourselves, but we're going to try to get out Beta 3 with the new Amazon translator by the end of this week. The new translator uses a completely different and much more stable technique for grabbing data, so it's likely that, whatever the issue, it will be fixed by the new one, and due to the Firefox DOM length bug mentioned on the PubMed thread above, we're not able to fix the old one for b2.r2 anyhow (even if we could reproduce it).

    Thanks for your patience.
Sign In or Register to comment.