Alert Message

adoggg
Is there a way to popup an alert message from a translator? Sorry if this is a n00b question, I have looked everywhere.
  • ajlyon
    Have you tried it? I don't know. Such a translator won't be accepted into the main Zotero distribution, since they are supposed to fail cleanly or work. Nothing in between. What specifically are you trying to do?
  • Simon
    I believe that doc.defaultView.alert() should work, but as ajlyon says, I can't imagine a legitimate reason that an alert should be necessary.
  • adoggg
    doc.defaultView.alert() works great, thanks.

    Wow, you guys are short on imagination if you can't possibly imagine a reason to present a notification to a user from a translator. How about "I just captured this page, but I want to tell the user about some ambiguity in the data" or "I just had a non-fatal error in the capture process that I want to indicate to the user" or about 10 others that I can imagine of the top of my head. In our case, it's a more complicated scenario where we want to indicate to the user that we know that the page has already been captured by somewhere else - I won't get into the details on how we know that.

    Personally I love it when I ask a "How do I" question and get the classic forum response: "Why are you even doing that?" So helpful.

    Anyway you did help so thanks Simon.
  • ajlyon
    I can imagine why you'd want an alert for an internal application of Zotero-- but they're not permitted in translators that ship with Zotero.

    It would be nice to allow more interactive site translators in general-- with somewhat more flexibility than the single selectItems function allows. But we have to tread carefully here-- translators should usually be intuitive and magical, with no user input.

    I think you could repurpose selectItems to get more user input (display options, instead of items), actually, if you want to use something from the traditional translator toolbelt.

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