OO plugin says "an error occurred communicating with zotero" after lucid upgrade

jphekman
Hi, all.

I recently upgraded to lucid lynx. After the upgrade, OO plugin no longer worked. I read this forum and discovered that I should uninstall icedtea6-plugin, which I did. Now, the OO plugin gets a little farther, but when I try to add a new citation, I get an error box with a Java stack trace. It says "an error occurred communicating with zotero - com.sun.star.uno.RuntimeException" (and then lots more stack). This error window can't be closed; I have to kill the openoffice process.

I have tested my Java plugin and it appears to work.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled the Firefox OO/zotero plugin. I have asked the FIrefox zotero/OO plugin to reinstall the OO plugin, which it informs me it does "successfully."

Any help appreciated!

Thanks,
Jessica
  • jphekman
    Just tried completely uninstalling Zotero plugin itself from Firefox and reinstalling that, then reinstalling the OO plugin. I still get the Java error / stack trace.

    Maybe I will try backing up to the previous version of Zotero.
  • jphekman
    OK, turns out I can create Zotero citations successfully in new documents. So that's something. That doesn't help me edit my 70 page thesis with 200+ citations in it, sadly; that is the document that is broken.

    If I try to "edit" a citation in my thesis, I get the Java error again, just as if I tried to insert a new one. FWIW, the first error in that stack from zotero.org is org.zotero.integration.ooo.ReferenceMark.removeCode.

    If I copy a chunk out of my thesis into a new document, the new document can insert citations (yay) but does not recognize the copied and pasted citations as citations (bleh). For 200+ citations it would be hours and hours of work to redo them.

    Deleting the bibliography doesn't help -- I still get the error. I just deleted the bibliography by highlighting and Ctl-X; is there something else I am supposed to do?

    When I try to edit the bibliography (using the Zotero button for the purpose) I am told I must first insert a bibliography. When I try to insert a bibliography, I get the Java error.
  • Simon
    edited July 15, 2010
    Are you getting a dialog asking you to reselect a citation first? This is the only reason I can think of that the removeCode method would get called at all, unless you press the Remove Field Codes button.

    In any case, can you send a screenshot of the error to support@zot...org with a link to this thread? If you are comfortable with sending us the document as well, that would be great, but the screenshot alone many do the trick.
  • jphekman
    They are on their way. The document is sort of massive, so if you are likely to have a problem with that in the account's inbox, let me know and I can send it separately from the screenshot, or put it up somewhere for download, or something. And thank you!
  • jphekman
    Oh, and no, I am getting no dialog first -- just the error.
  • Simon
    Ah, from seeing the screenshot, it looks like you're using bookmarks? If this is the case, try downloading OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org, which doesn't have this bug, rather than using the version included with Lucid.
  • jphekman
    OK, upgraded to OO 3.2.1. Now instead of a Java stack dump, I get the message "Zotero experienced an error updating your document." I reported it using the Zotero error reporting tool; it is ID 937167633.
  • Simon
    You may need to change the paths in the Zotero OpenOffice Integration preferences (under Tools->Add-ons) to point to your new installation. Simply clicking the "Detect OpenOffice.org Paths" button there may do the trick. If not, these instructions may help.
  • jphekman
    Thanks, Simon. I went and made that change. It successfully detected the location "file:///opt/openoffice.org3/program/" which is indeed where the soffice binary is. I restarted OO. Same error when I try to add a citation (bookmark). I submitted the error report again (ID 840516725) in case things changed now that I have the correct OO path.

    Sorry to have to report that it is still not working; I have really appreciated your help so far.
  • jphekman
    Since you mentioned bookmarks at one point, I went to check. I was not using bookmarks; I was using ReferenceMarks.

    Just to see, I went to my laptop (running jaunty) where I have an old and still-working version installed. I saved the document as .odt and changed the document settings to save as Bookmarks. I edited a citation to make the document rewrite them all. Then I copied this odt document back over to my desktop (lucid). I still get the same error with the odt version.

    Hopefully this will shed some light -- since I was not using bookmarks, maybe the OO upgrade was not useful?
  • julm
    edited August 24, 2010
    I have here the same problem, linux lubuntu lucid and whenever I add a second citation to an existing doc I get the 'com.sun.star.uno.RuntimeException etc pp ...' error message (without any dialogue). This then freezes OO until I kill FF (which is not responsive at that stage anymore). After FF is dead, OO becomes responsive again.

    So are there any news how to handle this problem? Thanks!

    Edit: this seems to be the same problem: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/13638/openoffice-zotero-integration-error-java-problem/
  • Jon Rubin
    This thread was about problems with icedtea which meant that no references could be installed at all.
    Your problem sounds like you are hitting the Bookmarks bug which is separate. Have a look at this

    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12582/unable-to-use-bookmarks-in-zotero-in-ubuntu-1004/#Item_28

    I never actually tested 3.0a9 as I don't use bookmarks. Unless you really need to share this document with a word user, then I'd just use reference marks for now.
  • scholzilla
    I'm having the same problem as above with the .com.sun.star.uno.RuntimeException error. I'm running oo3.2 on Ubuntu and, after reading other threads, reinstalled oo via their website instead of the cannonical repositories. As for zotero, I have installed and reinstalled 2.1.5 and have tried both 3.5a1 oo integration and the 3.1b with the same result. By the way, my dissertation is due thursday. I've had some success with reference marks in .odt docs, but the bibliographic style i need is not available so I need to use bookmarks in a .doc file. I saw above where Simon wrote to check "Zotero OpenOffice Integration preferences (under Tools->Add-ons) to point to your new installation. Simply clicking the "Detect OpenOffice.org Paths" . This option is no longer available in 2.1.5 (no such button).

    Thanks for helping. I'd post a screenshot of the error, but am not sure how to do that here.
  • fbennett
    edited April 5, 2011
    My track record for advice on plugin matters is pretty poor, but I've done several recent installs of Zotero with OpenOffice, and there's one thing I'd suggest with that configuration:

    Preferences -> Cite -> Reinstall Extension -> Next

    (wait a sec until Next button again becomes clickable)

    Next -> Manual Installation

    (pause to read explanatory text)

    The Firefox profile directory in which the OO portion of the plugin resides should come up on screen. Double-click on the plugin file (*.oxt) and wait for OO itself to complete the install.

    For me, this install process has not failed since it was introduced. YMMV.
  • fbennett
    edited April 5, 2011
    Other things to possibly check are:

    - The permissions (with OO closed) on the ~/.openoffice.org hierarchy. Everything in there should be owned by you, not by root.

    - The existence (with Firefox and OO both closed) of a file ~/.zoteroIntegrationPipe. If the file exists and both OO and Firefox are closed, delete it.

    (not sure that's on point, so I'll leave it there)
  • scholzilla
    Thanks for the effort. Unfortunately, none of the above worked. I did the manual install, have permissions, and there is no ./zoteroIntegrationPipe file when ff and oo are closed.

    I don't know if this is useful, but I used to have a nicely designed zotero toolbar in openoffice, which no longer appears. Now I have to go to the toolbars menu and open up a toolbar called "Add-on 1" that looks rather soviet. I almost hate to bring this up, though, because my problem predates the disappearance of the integrated toolbar.
  • Simon
    edited April 5, 2011
    Does this happen in a new document? Are you using Bookmarks (in the Zotero document preferences) in your current document?
  • scholzilla
    Yes, this does happen in new documents, and I am using bookmarks. Reference marks do work, but again, the style i need is not available in reference marks. Thanks.
  • Simon
    All styles work with ReferenceMarks, although footnote styles don't work with Bookmarks, but if you have to use Bookmarks can try installing OpenOffice Integration Trunk XPI.
  • scholzilla
    hmm...strange. Previously when I was using reference marks and trying to create a bibliography with either IEEE or AMA style, I was getting an error message saying that reference marks didn't support those bibliographic styles (but it did support, for example, Nature Journal). But I've just noticed that in the process of updating, this message no longer appears. That's great...I'll just used reference marks, then. Thanks for the help.
  • scholzilla
    edited April 6, 2011
    ok, but now i have a new error. If I try to insert a citation I get: "OpenOffice.org could not communicate with zotero. Please ensure firefox or zotero standalone is open and set to an online state." I'm not using standalone and firefox is online with zotero open.

    I don't know if this is the problem, but if it is I don't know how to fix it: my firefox privileges are assigned to root, whereas zotero is owned by my user profile.
  • adamsmith
    It's probably worthwhile to upgrade Ooo - either to 3.3 or to Libre Office - that seems to fix a bunch of problems with integration. Since Ubuntu is moving to Libre Office anyway, might as well take the plunge now.
  • scholzilla
    Thanks Adam. I just found a fix by going into term and changing the perms on a file as below:

    chmod ug+w /home/matt/.mozilla/firefox/ayow26y5.default/zotero/zotero.sqlite-journal
  • edelacruz
    I had the same problem, but I have updated to firefox 4 and then i installed zotero and works fine.
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