Dragging multiple items into a Collection

francesca
Is there currently a way to drag more than one item into a Collection at a time? If so, how? And if not, (when) will it be added?
  • sean
    This functionality has always been available. Highlight multiple items (using shift- or control-clicking) and then drag them.
  • francesca
    edited February 6, 2008
    I see you're right. So I've clicked around a bit more and have been able to determine the actual problem: certain combinations of items (by which I am not strictly referring to 'Items' but also Notes, Pdfs, Snapshots, etc.) prevent a group of selections from transferring. I discovered the following by trying to drag combinations of items out of My Library and into Folders.

    What will transfer:
    - Multiple items of any format.
    - Note(s) + Item(s)
    - Note(s) + Link(s)
    - Pdf(s) + Snapshot(s)
    - Pdf(s) + Link(s)
    - Snapshot(s) + Link(s)

    What won't transfer:
    - Note(s) + Pdf(s)
    - Note(s) + Snapshot(s)
    - Pdf(s) + Item(s)
    - Item(s) + Snapshot(s)
    - Item(s) + Link(s)

    (These are the only formats I have in My Library at the moment, so I don't know if different sorts of Item - e.g. 'Book'/'Film'/etc. - would behave differently from an Item based on a webpage.)

    Any group I try to transfer that contains a combination of 'What won't transfer' ... simply won't transfer (i.e. when I click on one of the selected items and drag my mouse over the Folder name, the cursor does not change to a arrow with a grey square at its tail - it stays as a black circle with a line drawn through it and when I let go nothing happens).

    Is this a glich or am I missing some glaringly obvious reason as to why certain items are incompatible for transferring simultaneously?
  • erazlogo
    Manual collections are designed to contain parent items with their children. It looks like when a child item is selected without its parent (tested w/ snapshots only), neither the child item nor its parent are transferred to the collection. Perhaps it would be more logical to have unselected parent items follow selected children to manual collections--transferring nothing at all seems counterintuitive.
  • francesca
    I'd like to add that all the items I tested in order to create the above list are stand-alone items: stand-alone Notes, stand-alone Links, stand-alone Pdfs, stand-alone Snapshots, and of course, stand-alone (parent) Items.

    Although I'm afraid I didn't understand your last sentence :S ... I think this might be in relation to it: keeping in mind that Note(s) + Snapshot(s)=What won't transfer, I have just tried expanding a parent-item > selecting its child-snapshot > Ctrl+selecting a stand-alone note > dragging into a folder. ... Doesn't work.
  • scot
    @erazlogo: any idea whether the no-children-without-parents limit is written pretty deeply in to Z? (Could it conceivably be re-done?) I can think of situations where the flexibility to have lone children (or at least children with the parent, but not all other siblings) in a collection would be nice. I like to use tags for permanent categories and folders for temporary and workflow orginization. It would be handy to, say, take a few quotes by in work X (children items of the biblio item) and put them into a folder with a few quotes from item Y. The folder represents a single question which they both propose answers to. But I don't want all of their siblings in the folder, since they don't all relate.
  • erazlogo
    edited February 6, 2008
    francesca: dragging standalone items works fine for me

    scot: see an earlier forum discussion
  • francesca
    really? it works for you even in the combinations that Won't Work?

    and if so, does anyone else have a clue as to what's going on?
  • dstillman
    Francesca: Make sure the Quick Copy Default Output Format setting is set in the Export pane of the Zotero prefs (and if it is, temporarily try setting it to Zotero RDF rather than a bibliography style).

    If it's still not working, check if Report Errors becomes active (non-gray) after attempting to drag, and if so, send in an error report and post the Report ID it provides here.
  • francesca
    Dan: I set the Quick Copy Default Output Format from 'Chicago Manual Style (full note with bibliography' to 'BibTeX'. However this made no difference.
    Furthermore, there was no option in the drop-down menu to set it to 'Zotero RDF'.

    I have, however, been able to report the error using the 'Report Errors ... ' option in the Settings menu, so I hope that might illuminate matters. The Report ID is:
    841279863.

    To everyone: thank-you for the time and attention you've offered!

    I'm curious to see my Zotero's secretly been getting up to :) ...
  • dstillman
    Thanks for the error report. This occurs on Windows and Linux (not OS X), and it's now fixed in the latest dev build.
  • francesca
    edited February 6, 2008
    Great! Thanks so much!

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