Virtual Location : Combined Folders

[jacky]

Okay so this has been an idea of mine for a little while, and I'm honestly not sure if it's done in other apps or not, but I always thought it would be a cool thing. And since there's been some talk about virtual folders lately, I thought this was a good time to mention this.

The current idea for VFOs would be a simple list of items to be listed when going there. My idea would be for a different kind of virtual locations, which would - as implied by the name - basically "combine" (the content of) different folders. For instance, you'd create such a new location pointing to D:\Folder, E:\Archives\Folder and \\server\Shared.Folder

Then, when browsing to this location XY would simply list the mixed content of all specified locations. Yes, it's sort of like search results in a way, but not really. Yes because it lists files from different locations and you could end up having more than one item with the same name, but not really because subfolders wouldn't be recursively scanned, and they'd be "combined" instead -- which also takes all its power when such a location can be added/used on (Mini)Tree.

So the idea is, imagine you have this:
D:\Folder
D:\Folder\foo
D:\Folder\bar
E:\Archives\Folder
E:\Archives\Folder\foobar
\\server\Shared.Folder
\\server\Shared.Folder\foo
\\server\Shared.Folder\bar

Then browsing to this "combined folders" VFO would give, in List/Tree, a total of 3 subfolders : foo, bar and foobar. The idea being that when going into [VFO]\foo we get the "combined" content of both D:\Folder\foo and \\server\Shared.Folder\foo, which would show the files and subfolders from both locations (same deal, same-named-folders being merged/combined...), and so on.

Could something like that find its way on your to-do list ??

[graham]

I thought this was exactly what was intended and maybe initially introduced using tags as a means to identify the VF content. I is, I think, a very useful and powerful application to be abale to quikly reference a mixed source of files.

[admin]

...So the idea is, imagine you have this:
D:\Folder
D:\Folder\foo
D:\Folder\bar
E:\Archives\Folder
E:\Archives\Folder\foobar
\\server\Shared.Folder
\\server\Shared.Folder\foo
\\server\Shared.Folder\bar

Then browsing to this "combined folders" VFO would give, in List/Tree, a total of 3 subfolders : foo, bar and foobar. The idea being that when going into [VFO]\foo we get the "combined" content of both D:\Folder\foo and \\server\Shared.Folder\foo, which would show the files and subfolders from both locations (same deal, same-named-folders being merged/combined...), and so on.

Could something like that find its way on your to-do list ??

I'm not sure about the same-name condition (maybe I did not understand) -- why should this be necessary? But adding folders (to be browsed/"resolved") to the file lists (or lets call them "stacks" because "file list" is already the name for a control as opposed to "folder tree"), should be no problem by adding a simple marker (e.g. a > prefix) so the parser knows what to do.

So, the following stack "foo.dat":

Code: Select all

>D:\Folder\foo
>E:\Archives\Folder\foobar
>\\server\Shared.Folder\bar

would list the contents of the three contained folders. Which could be a very useful thing indeed!

[j_c_hallgren]

Okay so this has been an idea of mine for a little while, and I'm honestly not sure if it's done in other apps or not, but I always thought it would be a cool thing.

I'm 95%+ sure that I've seen this request here before but so far, I can't locate the thread...and in that thread(s), it seemed that at least one other product had this ability.

I see it as somewhat similar to what a search results tab has, but without having to have done a search.

Upd: This might have been what I was thinking of:
http://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3192

[jacky]

I'm not sure about the same-name condition (maybe I did not understand) -- why should this be necessary?

To be clear, I didn't mean to imply the "combined folders" must have the same name, what I meant was about the way their subfolders would be treated.

The idea being that if you combine D:\Folder\foo and E:\Archives then going to that virtual location would list the merged/combined content both folders. But, and that's where it'd be different from files or what happens on search results, if both folders had a subfolder called "foobar" I do not wish to see two subfolders foobar on List/Tree, but only one. And when going there, we should get the merged/combined content of both F:\Folder\foo\foobar and E:\Archives\foobar -- all that done automatically by XY.

jc: Maybe I got that wrong, but on that thread I think the idea was what we'll get with virtual folders, e.g. under one same virtual location you get many items - files or folders - from different locations (e.g. all items tagged "blue"), where I wanted to see the content of folders be "combined" and all contained items listed as if under the same location (without having to tag each items individually), including auto-combining subfolders as well. Anyways, here we are now.

[admin]

I'm not sure about the same-name condition (maybe I did not understand) -- why should this be necessary?

To be clear, I didn't mean to imply the "combined folders" must have the same name, what I meant was about the way their subfolders would be treated.

The idea being that if you combine D:\Folder\foo and E:\Archives then going to that virtual location would list the merged/combined content both folders. But, and that's where it'd be different from files or what happens on search results, if both folders had a subfolder called "foobar" I do not wish to see two subfolders foobar on List/Tree, but only one. And when going there, we should get the merged/combined content of both F:\Folder\foo\foobar and E:\Archives\foobar -- all that done automatically by XY.

auto-combining same-named subfolders? ... strikes me strange. I guess you have a special use case in mind? Anyway, this does not look like something I want to do.

[j_c_hallgren]

jacky, I'm not sure how these combined folders would appear in tree/list but I can understand the concept, I think...the closest current way to get a list showing this would be a wildcard search showing all files within the two selected subfolders, right? Now I would suspect that having path showing as a column might be needed to identify the true location.

Don, I believe I can see the need/usage of this...suppose you had two subfolders named same but on two diff drives (local & external) so possibly contents aren't in sync and you wanted to take files from either of those two to put into a third folder...by having a "blended" folder, you could do so easily, but if you had separate source subfolders, you'd have to keep switching back & forth or do a search as above....however, having the "blended" concept, you could toggle between various 'sets' of source subfolders quickly/easily.

[RalphM]

Well, the merging part might look familiar, because I suggested to do the same thing with catalogs.

http://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic. ... 074#p31074

[jacky]

auto-combining same-named subfolders? ... strikes me strange. I guess you have a special use case in mind? Anyway, this does not look like something I want to do.

Well, that's a sad news. I think it'd be pretty useful, for example when you got folders of one project spread over different drives/computers, to merge everything into one single (virtual) location. Besides, It would make more sense to me that having many subfolders by the same name

jacky, I'm not sure how these combined folders would appear in tree/list

Well, just as any other subfolders. The idea was simply to have one subfolder instead of two by the same name. (And on List, the column Path could simply use a pipe-separated format to show the list of all source folders.)

[admin]

auto-combining same-named subfolders? ... strikes me strange. I guess you have a special use case in mind? Anyway, this does not look like something I want to do.

Well, that's a sad news. I think it'd be pretty useful, for example when you got folders of one project spread over different drives/computers, to merge everything into one single (virtual) location. Besides, It would make more sense to me that having many subfolders by the same name

I think you have some special thing in mind. I have enough to do to get the basic functionality going. Any refinements will have to wait for a phase 2...

BTW, it's Cologne Carnival -- the season of software development slow downs!