October 2005 October 2005 issue

Hi, and welcome to the fourth issue of our watchDirectory announcements newsletter.

Development corner

The last month we released a few improvements to watchDirectory:

  • The FTP plugin now supports "raw FTP commands" and actually uses the port settings (they were ignored previously, always using the default FTP port)
  • The ZIP plugin can remove the files that have been zipped
  • The Copy files has a new option to keep the original extension when it renames existing files.
  • The Email plugin can use a lot more variables.

The "Auto Sort" plugin, promised in the previous newsletter, is delayed a bit. It will be released later this month.

We intend to release version 4.1 in the near future that will have an exciting new feature: Right-click any file and start one of your tasks for it. For example, you have configured a task that will upload new files inside c:\monitorme to your FTP server. Now you discover a file inside c:\notmonitored that you also want to upload... The new version will add an option to the Windows Explorer menus that allows you to run your watchDirectory tasks on the selected files.

Tip of the month: files that MUST be deleted

Some customers asked if watchDirectory can be configured to run a task when certain files are not deleted. For example, they want to receive an email alert if files are not removed 5 minutes after being created. This is possible by following these steps:

  • Create a new task (for example, using the email plugin)
  • Let it only monitor new files (important: NOT deleted files)
    (see the Events tab)
  • Use the scheduler to delay starting the task 5 minutes.
    (see the Scheduler tab)

You might think that this will email you for all new files 5 minutes after they are created. However, watchDirectory will notice that the file does not exist anymore and change the event from "new file" to "deleted file". As you didn't configure this task to start for deleted files, the event is ignored. If the file still exists after 5 minutes, watchDirectory will start the email task and you will receive your alert.

Speak to you again next month,

Gert,
Developer & Support guru