Advanced Tutorial 1: synchronizing my website via FTP
What you will learn with this tutorial
how to set up a synchronization view with Open New
Comparison box
how to filter files or folders out of a folder
comparison
how to use converters
how to generate a HTML report
how to run a synchronization visually
how to run a synchronization from the command line
Prerequisites
First of all let's imagine that your website contains PDF
documents in addition to all the usual files to find in a
website (such as HTML, ASP/X, PHP and web images as JPG, PNG
and GIF), so take a few PDF documents of your own or from
Internet, or use other documents for which you know a
converter program (i.e. a program transforming files to
something readable by Ellié Computing Merge, that is,
text files or images in the
supported
list).
You need to have access to an FTP site, preferably into a
private site or folder, so that you do not interfer with
others work. You can create a Site in the Launcher to
remember all the connection information.
Step 1: Setting up the synchronization view
Click on the Document / Comparison/Merge
/ New Comparison... (Ctrl+N) menu item.
Select "Folder Comparison" as the document type.
In the "left" source, select the path to your working
copy of the website on your local computer.
In the "right" source, enter your FTP account infos or
drag a site from the Launcher onto the empty panel or the
source combo field.
NOTE: you can copy/paste local file paths or URLs in
the source combos, or open the Browse button menu and select
the desired file/folder selector. This may be useful to enter
advanced FTP options. If you have doubt about what
or how to enter your information, click the Help button in
the FTP Source box.
Check the "Merge" checkbox, and select the "right" source
as the output location.
If "3-way merge " was checked, uncheck it
Validate the box.
Now you should see a 3 panels view with at left and
right your data and in the bottom panel a list of actions,
probably still telling 'Not yet computed' or 'Not
resolved' on many items. This is normal as you did not
explain yet what expect to do with the files which are
different.
Step 2: Filtering the view
Filtering the view is very often is generally a very fast
step which will gain you a great deal of time when comparing or
synchronizing. Why? first because filtering out files or
folders based on their name or presence is very simple and
efficient.
Imagine that you are using a version control tool, e.g.
SubVersion or CVS.
Open the document options dialog box (Document / View and
Comparison Options... menu item or
toolbar
icon).
Go into the
Folder Comparison/File
Name Filters section, enter the list of
extensions for the files or folders that you do not wish
to synchronize
to exclude VCS folders, enter something like:
.svn/;.cvs/ (notice the slash to tell Ellié
Computing Merge that the filter is about folders)
to exclude backup file saved by various editors:
*~;*.bak;*.orig
NB: you can exclude files or folders located under folder
or folder hierarchy (e.g. ///debug///*.o removes files .o
under any 'debug' folder)
If on the contrary, it is easier to express the files or
folders that should be kept, you can use 'Include Patterns:'
field
If you know a date which determines precisely a cut-off
between files already synchronized and files to synchronize,
e.g., the date/time just after last synchronization or the
start date/time for current task, it is good idea to set up a
filter using dates
First of all, is your FTP site time correct? this is
often not the case, because many FTP site display their local
time which is often not your local time. As a test,
drag'n'drop a dummy file from left to right (you can create a
dummy file with the right button New/Text File). Press
the Refresh
button, the
date set by your FTP server appears in front of the file
name, is it nearly now or is there some time shift, for
example, one hour or two?
if there is a shift, open the document options dialog
box (Edit/Document Options... menu item or
toolbar
icon).
go into the Data Sources Options, enter the time shift
here for the FTP (right) source
when validated, all the dates on the right side are
immediately visually updated, date and time comparisons are
based on this visual date
Go into
Folder Comparison/File Date Filter section
check "Use dates to hide files" then "Modified
before"
select the right date and time in the date and time
fields which are now enabled , or the 'days ago' field
Finally let imagine that you want to update only files
already existing in the FTP site:
Open the document options dialog box (Document / View and
Comparison Options... menu item or
toolbar
icon).
Go into
Folder Comparison/File Status Filter section
in the "Hide files or folder missing" group, check "in
the right hierarchy"
Of course, you can hide files or folders individually using
the right click menu on any item (or selection), and click Hide
item, and also change your mind clicking Make item visible.
Using this filtering option makes the comparison process
much faster. When you validate the options, the filtering
applies at once, it may take from a fewer millisecond to many
seconds on very large folder collections (many thousands). If
you feel that you can easily remove many files and filtering be
slow, because you first forgot to set the filter before
visiting, use a full refresh command (Ctrl+F5) it will
completely empty the view with only root folder loaded, then
changing your options and reloading will not list uninteresting
files or folders and may be much faster.
Step 3: Setting up a converter
If you are not interested yet in proprietary documents, you
can safely skip this step.
The converters are program which transform proprietary
formats (such as format from Adobe, Microsoft and so
on...) into standard formats (such as plain text, XML, HTML or
images such as JPEG, GIF, BMP...).
These converters can be set up manually, but it can be a
tedious process. To avoid you that, we have introduced a
feature called 'Auto-detection' in Ellié Computing
Merge using the scripting engine. This feature let
Ellié Computing write a small script for you (which we
publish on the Add-Ons section of the website), and you just
have to put it in your macros directory to get the converter
configured correctly.
Remember, that mostly all the options in Ellié
Computing Merge are per-session (i.e. per document): you can
publish these options to Options Set and reuse them, but
nothing forces you to do that.
Open the document options dialog box (Document / View and
Comparison Options... menu item or
toolbar
icon).
Go into the Converter panel by selecting it in the left
tree view:
if the converters list is empty, click the Auto-detect
button, it will fill the list with the converters which are
recognized by the default installation.
if no converter is able to treat the files that you
want, or if you have installed a converter from which you
know it can do the conversion work, contact us by the
ticket
system or at
info@elliecomputing.com,
we will help you get your documents converted to something
that Ellié Computing Merge can compare.
Validate your options
Find one of these documents in the comparison tree view
(you can use Ctrl+F Find Box for that, entering something
like *.PDF, or .+\.PDF if regular expressions are on).
Double-click on the document's line, it will display a
view comparing the converted documents, showing you the
potential differences
If you are particularly happy with your converters
settings, remember that you can export them (with the Export
button at the bottom left of the Document Options dialog box)
to an existing or a new Options Set, in particular to the
default one, the Options Set used as a base for new
comparisons in the graphical user interface (and in the
command line if --default parameter is used).
Step 4: Generating a HTML report
If you are not interested yet in generating comparison
reports, you can safely skip this step.
Before synchronizing your website, let generate a HTML
report of the comparison, it will let a nice snapshot of what
was to be changed be the synchronization. Here you will have to
determine what you want to generate exactly, Ellié
Computing Merge has many options and though the pre-selected
options match most users' needs. You may feel that they do
not.
As a first step, review what are the Reports
generation options:
Open the document options dialog box (Document / View
and Comparison Options... menu item or
toolbar
icon)
Go into the Reports panel by selecting it in the left
tree view, review the options then alos have a look to each
type of document (Texts, Images and Folders) it will give
you a good overview of what can be generated.
Click the Help button when a panel is displayed to get
a description of the usage of each field
For the sake of this tutorial, let's imagine that you
want to export only a folder with its content, so select a
folder in the folder comparison view.
Open the Reports dialog box with
File/Export/Export XML/HTML
In the left side list, choose HTML
In the Scope group, choose Selection
In the Selection output group, choose Preview. Later, if
you want to keep this report choose a report location.
You can choose which type of sub-documents are generated
for the files; HTML or HTML (embedded) will let you easily
review the changes
Click OK (Apply would simply save your choice for feature
usage, for example from command line, or when coming back,
after changing the selection, or using bookmark instead of
the selection)
A web-browser should pop-up with the report inside once
the comparison is finished
Step 5: Running the synchronization visually
Here you have two situations with two different technics to
synchronize:
you know that the synchronization process will always be
the same, Left to Right, and want maximum automation:
Open the document options dialog box (Document / View
and Comparison Options... menu item or
toolbar
icon)
In the
Folder Comparison/2-Way rules section, select
"Mirror left" as the rule to apply.
Validate the box, then verify that the actions are
those expected in the bottom view "Remaining Actions"
column
press the
Write to result folder(s)
button in the toolbar, it displays a validation box telling
you what will happen. Here you can press Test to have a
list a what would be done, or Run to actually do the
job
when the mirroring operation is finished, click on
Close to dismiss the log window
you prefer to operate by hand:
select all the items in left view with Select All
drag and drop them on the right view, or right click to
open the contextual menu and select "Copy", look at the
task summary to check it matches your evaluation (this
may avoid copy errors, or to many selected items causing a
long operation)
click on Run to validate
when the copy operation is finished, click on
Close to dismiss the log window
Step 6: Running the synchronization from the command
line
Use the same process a Step 5 'you know that the
synchronization process will always be the same', but instead
of running the job:
Use the
Document / Save / Save Comparison or press
Ctrl+Shift+S to save the Comparison Template, here comparison
status will not be of interest for you (you do not care about
the actual merge status of individual items, only the sources
and settings interest you).
To run a synchronization: launch the following command
line, with the paths of Ellié Computing Merge, of your
template and left and right paths appropriately set:
We hope that you found this tutorial useful and that you
learnt several features. If you think that we could improve
this tutorial, please contact us at
info@elliecomputing.com or
create a
ticket on our
website.
toolbar
icon).
button, the
date set by your FTP server appears in front of the file
name, is it nearly now or is there some time shift, for
example, one hour or two?
button in the toolbar, it displays a validation box telling
you what will happen. Here you can press Test to have a
list a what would be done, or Run to actually do the
job