More user friendly connection to Zotero

[takluyver]

At present, the user has to go to a Zotero settings page, and copy down a user ID that is different from their username. This is less than ideal. I'd like to be able to just use their username, but I've yet to find an API to get the userID from the username. Question on Zotero forums.

It's probably possible to do this using oauth (docs), but that's complicated. If we want access to private Zotero libraries, however, we will need to jump through that hoop. (Are user libraries public by default? I can't remember)

[takluyver]

It looks like this will need to be oauth - there doesn't appear to be a username -> userID API.

[takluyver]

It could be done by scraping a page like https://www.zotero.org/takowl/items

[bramtayl]

Stupid question how to you change your userID if you entered your actual name and not the number on the settings page?

[takluyver]

There's no way to change it in the UI, but you can set it manually by running code like this:

from IPython.html.services.config.manager import ConfigManager
cm = ConfigManager()
cm.update('cite2c', {'zotero':{'user_id': '1234'}})

Or if you set it to None instead of an ID, it will prompt you again next time you go to use cite2c.

[bramtayl]

Great! It works perfectly. However, all my bibliographic information disappears when I try to export as html or pdf.

[takluyver]

Yeah, they will for now. HTML is issue #10 - that should be relatively easy to do using citeproc-7py. Latex is issue #7, and it will be a bit trickier, because we'll need to convert the CSL citation data to Bibtex.