Tuesday 29 April 2014

Smart File Manipulation


The problem

One of the most common tasks, If you do programming, is building a file structure from another file structure, perhaps zipping it into the archive, coping, deleting, moving…etc.
Typically, the installer does exactly this; it collects the files from different locations, and then creates the structures that will exist on the target computer, then it extracts the source files from the built-in archive and so on…
We all know that building such structures is a very time consuming task that requires many manual operations.
Usually it is writing of a script or a batch file.

Solution

So, how to build these structures effortlessly in no time?
I created the utility that automates this task and later on it can use once created script for file manipulation.
The idea of this software is simple: it consists of two parts
1. File collector, which is a tree view.
2. Executer (executes the number of steps)
The configuration can be created by adding a step. At a moment the steps are : Zip, Unzip, Delete directory, Copy Structure. Later on I‘ll add an FTP uploader and a Generic executer (or perhaps something more)
The target structure is created by dragging the source structure to the window. You have to expand it and check/uncheck the nodes on the tree (it is done recursively).
The target directory get dragged to the text box named “Target Dir” (and as many of them as necessary)
You can create folders or remove (rename) folders (or files) by right mouse clicking the tree nodes.
Once the structure is created, it can be processed by Zip, Copy or other processors.
The button on the top starts execution of these steps.

The configuration file is an xml file and the utility can consume this file as a command line.

I call this utility “Red Turtle File Manager”. Why so weird? It is done mostly for the search engines.
I needed something unique, though it is not too late to rename it to something more sensible.



The code will be uploaded soon for downloading (Conditional)
The installer is here

6 comments:

  1. I updated this utility. Fixed a couple of bugs and added new functions. Current version is 1.0.0.3

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, works definitely better . However I noticed it is a bit slow on the large files that it creates (300MB or bigger)

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  2. == I noticed it is a bit slow on the large files that it creates (300MB or bigger)

    Yes, true. It is because of the bug in Ionic zip library I use. Hopefully they'll fix it.

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  3. crashes upon launching program(post install). win7 -32

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  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  5. it's been fixed now. current version 1.0.0.5

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