Browse by tag, creator, year-- anything!

[avram]

We need to add a way to browse by things other than collections-- this is something very useful that still hasn't made its way into Zotero proper. The way it'd work is a new ListActivity with the browsing facets: "Tags", "Creators", "Years", etc. We'd add another activity like the current CollectionActivity that would show the various tags (for example) and, optionally, the number of tagged items. Choose an item, and you'd be shown an ItemActivity, like the present one, but with support for more diverse cursors.

Requires:

• Normalization of creators and tags into their respective tables, or else performance will be horrible
• Two new activities
• Generalization of ItemActivity to support non-collection cursors

[avram]

We're going to do this by having ItemActivity support a generalized Query data structure, instead of the current simple string... And since this is something that Zotero itself can't do, I'm pretty set on making this happen in 1.2 or before.

[fiveisalive]

Even if browsing by individual tags isn't yet supported, what about just allowing search by tags? I manage a lot of my library by tags not by collection, so it's currently hard to find things quickly.

[avram]

Searching by tag and browsing by tag will take the same amount of work-- right now the bulk of the item data is stored in a single blob of JSON data that I receive from the Zotero API. To make searching work, I need to pull that data out of the blob. Important, not a huge task, but needs to be done.