defunct ZotQuery: an Alfred workflow for Zotero

[Damoeire]

On 1/12/2018 at 4:34 AM, deanishe said:

 

Not at all. I should probably give the workflow its own thread on the forum first though. And yeah, GitHub would be the right place to point them to.

Hey Deanishe. Still wanting to spread the love about this workflow. Any objections if I just go ahead?

[deanishe]

11 minutes ago, Damoeire said:

Any objections if I just go ahead?

 

Give me a day or two. I need to update the workflow library now Alfred has a real way to change options.

 

But first, I need to upgrade a machine to High Sierra, as GitHub have changed their SSL settings, breaking Python on El Cap and Sierra.

[Neberheim]

On 12/21/2017 at 3:21 PM, deanishe said:

To be honest, I'm more interested in attracting contributors over users.

 

This is a workflow that I'm almost certainly never, ever going to use myself.

 

Dude, how are you so awesome? Trying to get Zotero to work better for me is what led me down the rabbit hole to finding Alfred in the first place. I’m ecstatic that there’s some active development on this front, and out of altruistic intentions at that. Python is installed and I’m learning a bit at a time. I hope I can help contribute to this in the future; I’ll certainly be using this workflow until then.

[cands]

Thanks again for this great workflow. To make it even more useful, is it possible to include more fields to search in the “Search all fields” function? Ideally I think all user-contributed fields would be valuable to include. As an example, for Item Type “Presentation”, the workflow does not return any results when searching for terms in the field “Meeting Name”, which would be handy to quickly find all items for a particular conference etc.

Edited June 21, 2018 by cands

[deanishe]

1 hour ago, cands said:

is it possible to include more fields to search in the “Search all fields” function?

 

Yes, but the way the workflow is set up, although it reads (almost) all fields from the Zotero database, the workflow's search index is hard-coded to certain fields (as is the zot: Script Filter).

I'm not sure how feasible it is to simply index all fields: without applying weightings to each field, the quality of the results would go down the toilet (you don't want hits in the Abstract treated the same as hits in the Title). I suppose you could add just one more "all" column to the index with a very low weighting and stuff everything else in there.

But I don't really want to do that. Like I've said, I've never cited anything in my life, and I have no idea what I'm doing. I wrote this workflow to provide a sensibly-structured basis (versus ZotQuery) for someone else who does know what they're doing to take forward. The idea is that one of the folks who tried and failed to get ZotQuery working again would take over this workflow instead. It should be pretty understandable to even an inexperienced coder.

I'm going to make one more release that uses Alfred's new settings API, and then I'm done (barring bugfixes). That is currently blocked, however, as is my Python library and all my Python workflows, because GitHub changed their SSL certs such that they're no longer compatible with (Python on) Sierra and earlier, which is what I'm still running.

 

Edited June 21, 2018 by deanishe

[cands]

@deanishe Thanks for explaining. Your idea of adding one more “all” column and stuff everything else in there (with low weighting) sounds great! I fully understand that you don't want to put more time into this workflow since you don't use it yourself. Thanks for all your efforts so far. Other users should be able to continue the development after your final release; I'll try to contribute myself, if time permits.

Edited June 25, 2018 by cands

[deanishe]

I've (finally) officially released v1.0.

 

I added the "all" field to the search, @cands. Also a Snippet Trigger and better configuration handling.

 

@Damoeire: If you'd like to spread the word now, that's cool. Please refer to the workflow's own thread, not this one (or better yet, its GitHub repo).

[cands]

On 7/8/2018 at 1:49 PM, deanishe said:

I added the "all" field to the search

Great, thanks very much, this will help a lot! Thanks for fixing the official release!