Build Automator Blog

After a week of very intense work we have completed all the programming and will be finishing up the documentation tomorrow. The new version, 1.5 will be out Tuesday morning if nothing unexpected comes up.

The FTP upload is complete and works great. It's fairly simple and only allows uploading of files to a single folder on the server. Later on we will add more powerful action that can upload subfolders as well. The server connection information is set up separately so when you create a new FTP action, you simply select the server from a dropdown list or click a button to view and update connections.

The FTP upload action is a bit different from other actions because it allows you to test the action right when you are setting it up. This way you can make sure that the connection is correct and you can optionally upload the files also to make sure that everything is put in it's place. You can optionally set the files to be uploaded as lowercase.

We added a very useful feature to the "Clarion compile" actions that allows us to grab any errors from the compiler window and automatically include them in the Build Automator log. This screenshot shows the results of compiling a Clarion app that resulted in 4 compiler errors. The Build Automator log now shows you what module is involved, what lines and what errors! This makes it so much easier to spot problems during unattended compiles. Big thank you to Clarion guru Larry Sand for helping me out with some screen scraping code that worked absolutely perfectly for this! And thanks to one of our Clarion users for suggesting this on the forum last week

The last thing we have worked on is a very powerful "Delete Files" action. It has several very powerful options which I'm going to discuss just a little bit.

You can select a single file or you can select a folder. If you select a file, then only that one file would be deleted, but you can always modify the selected file/folder to include any valid wildcards. For example C:\Temp\*.* would apply to all files in the C:\Temp\ folder and C:\Temp\*.txt would apply to all *.txt files.

You can Include Subfolder, which will then recursively delete files in all the subfolders under the selected folder. For example for C:\Temp\*.* it would delete all files in C:\Temp\ and any subfolders that might exist under the C:\Temp\ folder.

The Build Automator can prompt for confirming the delete process. Note that this will halt unattended builds and the program will wait until the question is either confirmed or declined. So if you are running unattended builds, we suggest that you uncheck the "Confirm Delete" when you are satisfied that it is correctly set up and it works correctly. The message will tell you how many items there are available to delete.

The deleted files can optionally be sent to the Recycle Bin or it can be skipped. Skipping the Recycle bin is considerably faster but then the delete process is premanent and cannot be reversed. Use at your own discretion.

During deleting process every error is logged into the Build Automator log. The log gives you extensive error information directly from the operating system. However you can optionally select to log every file that is deleted. This is a good option to have when you are checking things out and setting things up to make sure that the files that you expect to delete were deleted and nothing else.

Normally Read-Only and Hidden files are not included in the delete process, but you have an option to include Read Only and Hidden files. Doing that adds a small subprocess that changes the attributes on the files to normal/archive before the delete process runs. System files are never included in the delete process. If you have needs to delete system files, please let us know and we will add that as an option. Files that are locked or in use by other processes cannot be deleted. They are reported in use and skipped.

If you are using the *.* wildcard in your delete process you can also opt to remove all the subfolders. This option is only available when you use the *.* wildcard as that's the only way that all files are removed from all subfolders. If you need to completely remove a subfolder but can't use the *.* wildcard, we suggest that you set up a second "Delete Files" action that deletes the subfolder and all of it's files.

Similar to the FTP Upload action, you have an option on the "Delete Files" action window to click a button to bring up a view of all the files included in the file search and would be deleted by the process. This makes it easier to check what files are included with the different wildcards and also if there are files in subfolders etc. that match the wildcards.

Tomorrow, Monday, we will finish up the documentation and the install and the new version will be out Tuesday

-- Arnor Baldvinsson