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.
Full-text content is now synced to the server and other clients. Up to
~500K of content is transferred with each sync, so multiple syncs may be
necessary. Downloaded content is written to temporary files and
processed on idle (currently 5 seconds), so synced content may not be
immediately available.
Performance will improve with API syncing and async DB in 4.1.
This also includes some other full-text tweaks, such as storing
text converted from HTML in cache files, which may speed up phrase
searching.
This change should improve Firefox startup time. If the Zotero pane is
opened before Zotero has initialized, the pane will be blocked with a
progress bar until it's done. Standalone currently does the same, but it
should be changed to just delay opening the window if possible.
The upgrade wizard has been disabled for schema upgrades, in the hope
that upgrades can be done in a way that won't break compatibility with
earlier versions (or that can at least be done in a way such that we can
put out point releases of the last major version that provide
compatibility during beta/post-upgrade periods).
This patch likely breaks many things, and definitely breaks connector
mode.
This change also removes upgrade steps for databases from Zotero 2.1b2
and earlier. Users with such databases will need to upgrade via Zotero
4.0.x first or delete their data directories and start anew. This should
only affect users who haven't opened Zotero since Nov. 2010.
- New tag colors support, with the ability to assign colors to up to 6
tags per library. Tags with colors assigned will show up at the top of
the tag selector and can be added to (and removed from) selected items
by pressing the 1-6 keys on the keyboard. The tags will show up as
color swatches before an item's title in the items list.
- Synced settings, with Notifier triggers when they change and
accessible via the API (currently restricted on the server to
'tagColors', but available for other things upon request)
- Silent DB upgrades for backwards-compatible changes. We'll do
something fancier with async DB queries in 4.0, but this will work for
changes that can be made without breaking compatibility with older
clients, like the creation of new tables. The 'userdata' value is
capped at 76, while further increments go to 'userdata2'.
TODO:
- Try to avoid jitter when redrawing swatches
- Optimize tag color images for retina displays
- Redo attachment dots in flat style?
- Clear all colors from an item with 0 (as in Thunderbird), but I don't
think we can do this without undo
