externals

[Bob Sneidar]

Wow. I was looking for something like this. I was using Captain FTP  
and their companion app Crowznest. Only problem is, THEY DIDN'T WORK  
RIGHT! I may look into this as an alternative means of managing watch  
folders.

I know from talking with Tech Support that the Mac OS does in fact  
have a mechanism for setting up and generating an event when the  
contents of a folder have changed. But therein lies a difficulty. When  
does the event get generated? If I copy 10 large files to a network  
share, the OS will generate the event right away, but not all the  
files are there yet. Any software reacting to that event will not get  
"the full picture" of what happened, and that is exactly what was  
happening to me. Some files get processed by Captain FTP, some do not.  
And what happens if my "watcher" app was not running at the time the  
event was generated? NOTHING gets processed.

Your solution (which I presume checks the the present condition  
against the last know condition) might be just exactly the thing I am  
looking for. Now if I had a means to FTP the file directly from  
Revolution and not proceed with the next until the first file was  
finished, I would be golden. I am FTPing to a tape drive that has an  
FTP interface, but the read/writes are by nature linear so only one  
stream can occur at one time. This may be the perfect answer to the  
problem.

Bob Sneidar
IT Manager
Logos Management
Calvary Chapel CM

On Jan 21, 2009, at 9:10 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> viktoras wrote:
>> why not instead let user choose folders or files that should be
>> monitored and then monitor these by comparing files (get files  
>> etc...),
>> folders (get folders) regularly. Use recursion to get into sub  
>> folders,
>> etc. Revolution is fast enough to do this efficiently.
>
> That's an excellent idea.  I was curious about how responsive it would
> be, so I took a couple minutes to throw together an example of this  
> and
> it seems reasonably efficient.
>
> I've posted the example to RevNet - in Rev, choose
> Development->Plugins->GoRevNet, and in RevNet look for "4W Folder
> Watcher" in the Stacks section.
>
> This modest example lets you pick a folder and it checks for changes  
> to
> files (name, size, additions, deletions).  It also provides a slider  
> to
> govern the interval between checks so you can experiment to find the
> best balance between system overhead and responsiveness.
>
> One useful aspect of it is that the folder watching hander accepts the
> name of a callback handler as a param, so you can handle the change
> event however you like without having to modify the folder watcher
> handler itself.
>
> This is a very simple example, with lots of room for improvements like
> also checking folder changes within the target folder, and possibly
> sending additional info about exactly what changed to the callback
> handler if needed.
>
> But as a quick-n-dirty experiment, at least it shows that Rev can be
> used to monitor changes to folder contents with relative ease and
> acceptable efficiency for many uses, and on all supported platforms.
>
> --
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World
>  Revolution training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
>  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
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