"This item no longer exists in your Zotero database"
I'm having a problem with the 2.1.6 version of the plugin (Firefox on Ubuntu 10.10). After upgrading from 2.1.5, it upgrades my database and says everything went fine. However, when I go to add or edit a citation, it then goes back to the first citation in my book and gives me the following message:
---------------------------------------------
This item no longer exists in your Zotero database. Do you want to select a substitute item?
Clicking "No" will delete the field codes for citations containing this item, preserving the citation text but deleting it from your bibliography.
---------------------------------------------
The item actually does exist, but, from what I can tell by poking around in the sqlite database, for some reason Zotero has moved the old item to the deletedItems table and created a new one with a different key -- which would be fine, if only it would update the references in my book as well! I don't get this error for absolutely every citation I already have, but I do get it for a lot of them. Way too many to want to go back and fix them all by hand.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else with this error. Can anyone shed any light on my problem and how to fix it? (For the moment, I have been able to go back to 2.1.5 and use a backup copy of the database, but eventually I will want to upgrade to the latest version.)
Sincerely,
Derek
---------------------------------------------
This item no longer exists in your Zotero database. Do you want to select a substitute item?
Clicking "No" will delete the field codes for citations containing this item, preserving the citation text but deleting it from your bibliography.
---------------------------------------------
The item actually does exist, but, from what I can tell by poking around in the sqlite database, for some reason Zotero has moved the old item to the deletedItems table and created a new one with a different key -- which would be fine, if only it would update the references in my book as well! I don't get this error for absolutely every citation I already have, but I do get it for a lot of them. Way too many to want to go back and fix them all by hand.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else with this error. Can anyone shed any light on my problem and how to fix it? (For the moment, I have been able to go back to 2.1.5 and use a backup copy of the database, but eventually I will want to upgrade to the latest version.)
Sincerely,
Derek
I may have figured out what's going wrong. Somewhere along the line, Zotero added an option to clean out deleted items that are older than a certain date. It defaults this option to "on" and the time limit to 30 days. Apparently some of my items were alive and well in the trash, but were getting removed automatically when this option turned on.
The frustrating thing is that the reason for these items moving to the trash is that the sync process caused me to have a huge number of duplicates at some point. I just deleted the duplicates, without thinking that it would cause some of my references to break (which, actually, it didn't until the trash was cleaned out). Not that I would have had any way of knowing which of the duplicate items to delete in any case.
Sincerely,
Derek
When Zotero has duplicate detection and management, it will store references to the old versions so that existing documents don't break.
I also ran into this same problem after updating to Zotero 2.1. From the discussion above I can't figure out what's the solution! Has anybody got a clue of what to do, because I'm stuck on the verge of submitting two papers!
Many thanks...
Hi, I am the author of the citeproc-js citation processor used by Zotero. Please check your zotero.org messages. I can provide you with a private copy of Zotero 2.1.6 with an updated processor that might address your problems. I can't guarantee that it will clear things up, but I've tracked down some bugs in the processor recently, and if you would be willing to run the processor against a copy of your data and documents, I would be interested in the result.
When I clicked on "Set Document Preferences" I got a message telling me that item 1 is not in my zotero database. When I checked the problem item (by entering this uri in firefox: zotero://report/items/0_BE3JM8R9/html/report.html ) as suggested by Dan Stillman in another thread, the item was there.
I now have the document working again - I pasted a paragraph from it into a new document, then hit "set document prefs". I then pasted the entire text of the file into this new document, hit "set document prefs", and it works fine.
Sidies, I have tried your link but it doesn't exists when i paste it into the firfox address bar. Could you check the link is correct and give more details of how to find "Set Document preferences"?
My items are still all in the library, it just seems to want me to replace each one by hand...considering my document is a PhD Thesis I am not so keen on this solution. ALternitavley does anyone know how to re-instal version 2.0?
Follow those instructions to get a proper report link to see if the items are really there. If not, then it's because you either exported and imported items via RDF or because you upgraded from Zotero 1.0 on separate computers and are editing on a different computer from where you originally started.
I also have a hard time understanding what you're describing - what you post here doesn't sound like the same problem that you described here:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/18265/this-item-no-longer-exists-in-your-zotero-database-do-you-want-to-select-a-substitute-item/
E.g. I don't know what you mean by a Zotero "naive" document, nor do I know what you mean by "eliminating all links". If you're unsure about technical terms, describe what you're doing and refer to the buttons you're pressing.