Dev Docs for Zotero Plugin

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Item Operations ​

Creating Items ​

A typical operation might include a call to Zotero.Items.get() to retrieve a Zotero.Item instance, calls to Zotero.Item methods on the retrieved object to modify data, and finally a save() (within a transaction) or saveTx() (outside a transaction) to save the modified data to the database.

javascript
const item = new Zotero.Item("book");
item.setField("title", "Much Ado About Nothing");
item.setCreators([
  {
    firstName: "William",
    lastName: "Shakespeare",
    creatorType: "author",
  },
]);
const itemID = await item.saveTx();
javascript
// Fetch saved items with Items.get(itemID)
const item = Zotero.Items.get(itemID);
Zotero.debug(item.getField("title")); // "Much Ado About Nothing"
Zotero.debug(item.getCreator(0)); // {'firstName'=>'William', 'lastName'=>'Shakespeare',
//   'creatorTypeID'=>1, 'fieldMode'=>0}
// Alternative format
Zotero.debug(item.getCreatorJSON(0)); // {'firstName'=>'William', 'lastName'=>'Shakespeare',
//   'creatorType'=>'author'}
item.setField("place", "England");
item.setField("date", 1599);
await item.saveTx(); // update database with new data

Getting Item Data ​

Different item (specifically, regular item) types have different fields. To get the value of a field, use the getField() method. For example, to get an item's abstract, we get the abstractNote field from the Zotero item:

javascript
const abstract = item.getField("abstractNote");

🔗 For more details about item fields, see item_types_and_fields.

Child notes ​

To get the child notes for an item, we use the following code:

javascript
const noteIDs = item.getNotes();

This returns an array of ids of note items. To get each note in turn we just iterate through the array:

javascript
for (const id of noteIDs) {
  const note = Zotero.Items.get(id);
  const noteHTML = note.getNote();
}

let relatedItems = item.relatedItems;

Set two items as related to each other

Given two items itemA and itemB. We can set them as related items to each other by using the addRelatedItem function:

javascript
itemA.addRelatedItem(itemB);
await itemA.saveTx();
itemB.addRelatedItem(itemA);
await itemB.saveTx();

Attachments full text ​

The code below gets the full text of HTML and PDF items in storage and put the data in an array:

javascript
const item = ZoteroPane.getSelectedItems()[0];
const fulltext = [];
if (item.isRegularItem()) {
  // not an attachment already
  const attachmentIDs = item.getAttachments();
  for (const id of attachmentIDs) {
    const attachment = Zotero.Items.get(id);
    if (attachment.isPDFAttachment() || attachment.isSnapshotAttachment()) {
      fulltext.push(await attachment.attachmentText);
    }
  }
}