Factiva translator problem

wednesdaysouth
Hi there,

I am having trouble with the Factiva translator (I am using it through my library's proxy, not sure if this is relevant). I get the snapshot folder icon in the address bar, but the usual "Could not save item" response when I click it and select an article to save. The site does seem to have changed since I last used it, which was some time ago.

I'm happy to do what I can to help with this, if given a pointer or two.
  • adamsmith
    sample URL?
  • wednesdaysouth
    Wow, quick turnaround. Its all a AJAXy type web app with no real urls to speak of. The one I have loaded at the moment is:

    http://0-global.factiva.com.alpha2.latrobe.edu.au/ha/default.aspx

    The alpha2.latrobe.edu.au bit is my proxy. I tried direct access via factiva.com but it wanted a login before doing anything useful.

    I have found the translator file and had a look. I note that it has a hardcoded URL to factiva.com that it feeds into Zotero.Utilities.HTTP.doPost. I will try fiddling with this in the meantime...
  • wednesdaysouth
    An update: I modified the hardcoded URL to include my library's proxy and the translator now saves a reference for me. I've done some poking to try to figure out how to refer to the auto-proxy thingy, but haven't really go a clue. If anyone can suggest how to do this more generally, I would be happy to do some more procrastinating.

    Another point: I am now trying to figure out how to get this translator to add a note to the new item it creates with the article text in it. Is there a reference or example code for creating a child note anywhere?
  • Simon
    Zotero can automatically detect some proxies, but not yours (because Innovative Interfaces Inc. won't provide us with the necessary information to do so, and we don't have an III proxy server to test with). You can, however, set this up manually. If you add a proxy in the Proxies section of the Zotero preferences with the scheme
    http://0-%h.alpha2.latrobe.edu.au/%p, check the "Multi-Site" box, add a hostname (if you add global.factiva.com here, Zotero will automatically redirect any links to global.factiva.com through your proxy; if you don't want this, you can add example.com), the translator should work without a hardcoded modification to the URL.

    To add a note to the item, add, immediately before newItem.complete(), something like

    newItem.notes.push("note text");
    I'm not sure how easy it is to retrieve the appropriate text to put here unless it's part of Factiva's XML export.
  • dstillman
    Make that:

    newItem.notes.push({note: "note text"});
    (We should fix that to accept just a string and not an object, but I believe at the moment it has to be an object with a 'note' property for internal reasons.)
  • wednesdaysouth
    Ah, it didn't occur to me the proxy rewriting would work at that level. Sorry, its working now. And thanks all for the JS tutorial. I have made a trivial patch to the Factiva translator and will mail it to the translators email address.
  • dstillman
    edited August 10, 2010
    There is no (longer a) translators e-mail address, and if you see one somewhere it should be removed. [Edit: OK, that address still shows up on this page, which is long since out-of-date.]

    Post the translator to the dev list as a file and send a note to the list.
  • wednesdaysouth
    Ah, OK. That is the page that I got the address from, and, FYI, the email hasn't bounced yet. I will post it to the dev list.

    Further to what Simon mentioned about the Innovative Interfaces Inc. proxy, I sent an email to one of our library web guys asking if he wanted to bug them about being more helpful. He didn't, but he had a bunch to say about how it worked and offered to help if you needed anything else. I will paste his reply on below, and let me know if you would like me to put you in touch with him.

    ...

    Hi Jem,

    Thanks for the email. I’m not surprised, Innovative are not the most flexible of companies to deal with. Their implementation (http://www.iii.com/products/web_access.shtml) is a lot more convoluted than say Ezproxy.

    The following is how a URL is proxified using La Trobe’s WAM proxy

    Take for example: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=term

    End result is: http://0-www.google.com.au.alpha2.latrobe.edu.au/search?q=term

    0 is the port number, (0 is default - and basically means port 80 for most web traffic but can be anything though eg. 8080)

    You prepend the destination domain (www.google.com.au) as a child domain to the proxy address (alpha2.latrobe.edu.au).

    If you have a query string or fragment/anchor tag this is appended after the proxy domain resulting in:

    http://0-www.google.com.au.alpha2.latrobe.edu.au/search?q=term

    Not sure if this information helps, but I’m happy to offer any advice to the Zotero developers if they are interested.
  • Simon
    Unfortunately, this information isn't quite enough. Basically, Zotero needs some way to know which part of the URL is the host being proxied and which part is the proxy server. For a URL like http://0-www.google.com.au.alpha2.latrobe.edu.au/search?q=term, it's not clear whether www.google.com.au is being proxied by alpha2.latrobe.edu.au or whether www.google.com is being proxied by au.alpha2.latrobe.edu.au.

    If we can't get more information about the III proxy system, we could potentially modify Zotero to guess at this, but there is potentially a better approach to this. With EZProxy, Zotero observes a redirect from https://login.mutex.gmu.edu/login?qurl=http://www.ams.org/joursearch/? to https://www.ams.org.mutex.gmu.edu, and thus knows that www.ams.org is being proxied by mutex.gmu.edu. If you don't mind taking some time to help us, we might be able to get the same approach working with III.

    If you install the Live HTTP Headers extension, open Tools->Live HTTP headers in Firefox, go through the process of logging into your proxy to go to a site (if you are already logged in, this won't work), and then copy and paste the output from the Live HTTP headers window to a text file and send it to support@zot...org, we should have all the information we need. The Live HTTP headers output will probably contain your proxy username and password, which you should replace with asterisks before sending us the file.
  • wednesdaysouth
    I have sent this through. Happy to help if you need anything else.
  • alexka3
    edited March 17, 2011
    Hi

    I'm a french student, this is my preference window for multi-site box :

    http://img852.imageshack.us/i/factiva.jpg/

    Systematically when I save my links through the shortcut in the adress bar, my links aren't stored. If I do it manually (what's take a lot of time for thousand links !) it's ok.
    With the shortcut I see the links in my library, but they are grey and "unclickable"

    Can you help me ? I really need to use those tools.

    Thanx a lot

    Alex
  • ztumin
    Hi - Can't save items from Factiva. URL: http://global.factiva.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/ha/default.aspx. Thanks.
  • ajlyon
    Can you provide search terms or document titles? I can confirm that some items that are simply links to external newspaper sites don't work, and I‌ don't know if we can make them work, but we need more info to determine what's going on in your case.
  • ztumin
    Sure, and thanks.

    Search Terms:
    ALL OF THESE WORDS: Bersin school
    THIS EXACT PHRASE: San Diego
    DATE RANGE: 19970101 to 20050101
    SOURCE: All Sources

    That's it! Thanks again.
  • ajlyon
    Not sure if this will fix it, but please go to http://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/raw/master/Factiva.js and save the file to the translators directory of your Zotero data directory (http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data).

    Reload the Factiva page and try again. If this works for you, please post here so that I can submit this change to be pushed to all users.

    If it doesn't work, post the document numbers of documents that don't work for you (they look like SDU0000020050103e11100054).

    I'll also look into saving fulltext as well, since it should be pretty easy.
  • ajlyon
    Not sure if this will fix it, but please go to http://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/raw/master/Factiva.js and save the file to the translators directory of your Zotero data directory (http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data).

    Reload the Factiva page and try again. If this works for you, please post here so that I can submit this change to be pushed to all users.

    If it doesn't work, post the document numbers of documents that don't work for you (they look like SDU0000020050103e11100054).

    I'll also look into saving fulltext as well, since it should be pretty easy.
  • ztumin
    Ok, will do. Many thanks!
  • ztumin
    Sorry to say I get the same error message. I opened and saved the factiva.js file, started firefox, opened zotero, opened factiva, did a couple of different searches; saw the one-click icon in the address bar, clicked, got the screen to come up where i could check the items i wanted to save, checked a random four items, clicked save....and then the error message - could not save/problem with translator. Same as before. thanks for your work on this. hope we might still fix it.
  • ajlyon
    If it doesn't work, post the document numbers of documents that don't work for you (they look like SDU0000020050103e11100054).
  • ztumin
    Ok - so *none* of the documents work. Do you still want their numbers? I can give you four random ones that fail.
  • ztumin
    (Document SDU0000020050103e11100054)
    (Document SDU0000020041229e0cr0003t)
    (Document SDU0000020041224e0cm0001t)
    (Document SDU0000020041223e0cj00020)
    (Document SDU0000020041221e0cj00036)
  • ajlyon
    Can anyone else with Factiva access give this a try? These work for me, so I'm wondering if perhaps there might be a difference in the page layout for different Factiva subscribers.
  • ztumin
    thank you!
  • ztumin
    @ajlyon - How can I further assist?
  • ajlyon
    Frankly, I‌ need to be able to replicate this myself to fix this. There is a real chance that this depends on the subscribing institution, in which case I‌ may be able to fix this if someone gives me temporary proxy access. It may also be specific to your setup -- but I can't really tell until more people chip in here and say whether they're having the same problems.
  • ztumin
    Ok, thanks. Lets hope to hear from folks, then. Again, thanks.
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