async export

[Emiliano Heyns]

I can't believe I'm asking for this, but would it be possible for a async nextItem to be added so export translators can yield for long-running (large) exports? I'm currently seeing "Zotero is non-responsive" messages wen doing very large exports; yielding at nextItem (or anywhere else really, but nextItem seemed logical to me) might be able to prevent this.

[Dan Stillman]

We're in the process of making some changes to how translation runs in
the client that should allow us to have proper async/await/Promise
support, after which we can probably do this.

[Emiliano Heyns]

Alternately, if the export would run in a worker thread, that would also solve the problem, but then the serialized objects would have to be transferrable to get zero-copy transfer of the serialized items.

[Emiliano Heyns]

Any progress updates? I have auto-export running in a ChromeWorker now, and if exports could do async, it'd be easy for me to put the regular BBT exports there too; BBT exports are pretty heavyweight, and a not-insignificant number of BBT users do large exports. An alternative way would be to monkey-patch Zotero.Translate.Export, but TBH between "complete" / "_checkIfDone" / "_prepareTranslation" and the handlers set by setHandler I'm a little lost on what the flow is of an export-translate as it happens now.