.contains() was removed in Firefox 48, but .includes() wasn't available until
40, so use indexOf() for now. We can start using .contains() once we no longer
need to support 38 ESR.
While trying to get translation and citing working with asynchronously
generated data, we realized that drag-and-drop support was going to
be...problematic. Firefox only supports synchronous methods for
providing drag data (unlike, it seems, the DataTransferItem interface
supported by Chrome), which means that we'd need to preload all relevant
data on item selection (bounded by export.quickCopy.dragLimit) and keep
the translate/cite methods synchronous (or maintain two separate
versions).
What we're trying instead is doing what I said in #518 we weren't going
to do: loading most object data on startup and leaving many more
functions synchronous. Essentially, this takes the various load*()
methods described in #518, moves them to startup, and makes them operate
on entire libraries rather than individual objects.
The obvious downside here (other than undoing much of the work of the
last many months) is that it increases startup time, potentially quite a
lot for larger libraries. On my laptop, with a 3,000-item library, this
adds about 3 seconds to startup time. I haven't yet tested with larger
libraries. But I'm hoping that we can optimize this further to reduce
that delay. Among other things, this is loading data for all libraries,
when it should be able to load data only for the library being viewed.
But this is also fundamentally just doing some SELECT queries and
storing the results, so it really shouldn't need to be that slow (though
performance may be bounded a bit here by XPCOM overhead).
If we can make this fast enough, it means that third-party plugins
should be able to remain much closer to their current designs. (Some
things, including saving, will still need to be made asynchronous.)
Groups were already being loaded for the collections list, so we might
as well just store them initially and let Zotero.Libraries.getName() be
a synchronous call.
0 allowed for some accidental behavior due to old code expecting NULL,
and it prevented easy checks (``if (!libraryID)``) for a passed
libraryID. Code now uses Zotero.Libraries.userLibraryID instead of a
hard-coded value (except in schema.js). Functions can still make
libraryID optional, but they should then use
Zotero.Libraries.userLibraryID if that's to mean the user library.
There might be some code that still expects 0 that I missed.
- Protocol handler extensions can now handle promises and can also make
data available as it's ready instead of all at once (e.g., reports now
output one entry at a time)
- zotero:// URL syntaxes are now more consistent and closer to the web
API (old URLs should work, but some may currently be broken)
Also:
- Code to generate server API, currently available for testing via
zotero://data URLs but eventually moving to HTTP -- zotero://data URLs match
web API URLs, with a different prefix for the personal library (/library vs.
/users/12345)
- Miscellaneous fixes to data objects
Under the hood:
- Extensions now return an AsyncChannel, which is an nsIChannel implementation
that takes a promise-yielding generator that returns a string,
nsIAsyncInputStream, or file that will be used for the channel's data
- New function Zotero.Utilities.Internal.getAsyncInputStream() takes a
generator that yields either promises or strings and returns an async input
stream filled with the yielded strings
- Zotero.Router parsers URLs and extract parameters
- Zotero.Item.toResponseJSON()
Promise-based rewrite of most of the codebase, with asynchronous database and file access -- see https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/518 for details.
WARNING: This includes backwards-incompatible schema changes.
An incomplete list of other changes:
- Schema overhaul
- Replace main tables with new versions with updated schema
- Enable real foreign key support and remove previous triggers
- Don't use NULLs for local libraryID, which broke the UNIQUE index
preventing object key duplication. All code (Zotero and third-party)
using NULL for the local library will need to be updated to use 0
instead (already done for Zotero code)
- Add 'compatibility' DB version that can be incremented manually to break DB
compatibility with previous versions. 'userdata' upgrades will no longer
automatically break compatibility.
- Demote creators and tags from first-class objects to item properties
- New API syncing properties
- 'synced'/'version' properties to data objects
- 'etag' to groups
- 'version' to libraries
- Create Zotero.DataObject that other objects inherit from
- Consolidate data object loading into Zotero.DataObjects
- Change object reloading so that only the loaded and changed parts of objects are reloaded, instead of reloading all data from the database (with some exceptions, including item primary data)
- Items and collections now have .parentItem and .parentKey properties, replacing item.getSource() and item.getSourceKey()
- New function Zotero.serial(fn), to wrap an async function such that all calls are run serially
- New function Zotero.Utilities.Internal.forEachChunkAsync(arr, chunkSize, func)
- Add tag selector loading message
- Various API and name changes, since everything was breaking anyway
Known broken things:
- Syncing (will be completely rewritten for API syncing)
- Translation architecture (needs promise-based rewrite)
- Duplicates view
- DB integrity check (from schema changes)
- Dragging (may be difficult to fix)
Lots of other big and little things are certainly broken, particularly with the UI, which can be affected by async code in all sorts of subtle ways.
- Implement connector for Firefox (should switch in/out of connector mode automatically when Standalone is launched or closed, although this has only been tested extensively on OS X)
- Share core translation code between Zotero and connectors
Still to be done:
- Run translators in non-Fx connectors (this works in theory, but it's not currently enabled for any translators)
- Show translation results in non-Fx connectors
- Ability to translate to server when Zotero Standalone is not running
Known issue: Window title isn't set correctly
Says Ben:
===========================================
Some uses for this feature include:
- people who don't want to use Firefox as their main browser could set their Firefox homepage to zotero://fullscreen, making Zotero act as a standalone application
- people who do use Firefox could add the link to their Bookmarks Toolbar, and simply Shift-click it to have a Zotero "standalone application"
===========================================
