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going beyond mirroring (2 posts)

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  • Started 20 years ago by rjb
  • Latest reply 20 years ago from Jim Matthews
  • rjb Member

    Mirroring feature is nice and handy for small web sites. However, this feature is useless for people like me who manage multiple sites with a few thousand files each. If you are serious about supporting web publishing, you need to implement what I would call Smart Uploads.

    What I mean is something along the following lines. Sorry for lengthy description but it is needed to properly explain the concept.

    In preferences, you add another tab called "Smart Uploads". Its major function will be to define "Root Folders" which is not less and not more than selecting a local folder and then defining the remote ftp root that corresponds to it. Essentially the same as what your "DropUpload" applet does when double-clicked BUT multiple pairs should be definable in Fetch. Of course, password could be optionally saved with URL (and when not saved, then asked for at connection time).

    Once this is done and Smart Uploads are enabled, when one drops any combination of folders or files onto Fetch, it should recognize that they are within a specific smart-upload root path (or multiple ones) and replace the local path to root folder with the predefined path to remote ftp root. In other words, it figures out into which remote directory within the ftp/web structure to put the uploaded files without my having to specify that. If a folder is dropped, the action should be equivalent to your current mirroring but for this folder only.

    I have been using an AppleScript that does exactly the above (figuring the proper directory, telling Fetch how to change it, and then doing an upload) but of course, the path manipulations and checking are quite slow with AppleScript, not mentioning the time needed to launch the applet and have it quit as well as waiting for it to launch Fetch and communicate with fetch. Fetch could do this all self in a breeze.

    A further option for each root folder would be to specify Finder label to filter files/folders either to be included or excluded. My current script, for example, skips all files/folders marked blue and uploads only those marked orange to a test site.

    I am quite sure that such a feature would be a boon for web managers and developers. If I have 500 files within a folder 5 levels deep into my structure and I just changed 3 of these files, I can then simply select those three and drop them onto Fetch which updates my web site accordingly. If I have a folder with 50 files and changed 30 of them, adding a few new ones and deleting a few of old ones, I would drop the whole folder onto Fetch and it would accordingly update my online files.

    I'd be happy to be a beta tester for this should you decide it is the right thing to do.

    Posted 20 years ago #

  • Jim Matthews Administrator

    Thanks for the well-explained suggestion. As it happens we have a similar request in our database of things to do for future versions; it'd clearly be a useful feature. I can't promise when it will be available, but thanks again for letting us know that you'd use such a feature.

    Thanks,

    Jim Matthews
    Fetch Softworks

    Posted 20 years ago #

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