Exporting stored files

[Jon Polish]

If I remember correctly, it was Quant who advocated against storing files in UR. Keeping them in the same directory as my urd file is an appealing alternative since the url to the actual file is relative.

I would like to try and see how well this would work for me. My databases are quite large and contain many, many stored files. Is there a way to export and delete all stored files en masse and create the links to the newly created files? I am sure there is a way (content type? DocType?), but I am feeling lazy.

Any suggestions?

Thank you.

Jon

[kinook]

After exporting, you could import them (linked, not stored) into a new database (created in the root export folder so that paths will be relative to it).

[Jon Polish]

Thanks, but that is not practical because of the amount of stored items some of which may be buried several levels deep. I guess I should break down my question.

1. Is it possible to search for stored files?
2. Once those stored files are found, it would be a simple matter of selecting all of them and dragging them to a folder on (for example) the desktop. I would like to keep the structure of my database and because the stored files could be anywhere and at any level, exporting and importing to a new database would hardly suffice. Is there any way to perform a mass synch operation with the files I just exported (I suspect not, and if this has to be performed individually, I won't even begin)?

Jon

[kinook]

Originally posted by Jon Polish
Thanks, but that is not practical because of the amount of stored items some of which may be buried several levels deep. I guess I should break down my question.

1. Is it possible to search for stored files?

Document Size exists

2. Once those stored files are found, it would be a simple matter of selecting all of them and dragging them to a folder on (for example) the desktop. I would like to keep the structure of my database and because the stored files could be anywhere and at any level, exporting and importing to a new database would hardly suffice. Is there any way to perform a mass synch operation with the files I just exported (I suspect not, and if this has to be performed individually, I won't even begin)?

You can select all and sync the stored items, but what happens depends on the value of each item's URL attribute (which is not modified by exporting). If the URL is a valid filename, it will copy the stored document to the file system (to a relative path if the URL has no path or a relative path), but syncing will not delete the stored instance.

[Jon Polish]

Originally posted by kinook
Document Size exists

Thanks. This works.

Originally posted by kinook
You can select all and sync the stored items, but what happens depends on the value of each item's URL attribute (which is not modified by exporting). If the URL is a valid filename, it will copy the stored document to the file system (to a relative path if the URL has no path or a relative path), but syncing will not delete the stored instance. [/B]

Yes, I was afraid of this. It won't be worth trialing this method because it will be far too work intensive. Perhaps I will try linking for a while. If linking the documents does not suit my purposes, I could simply select all that were linked and store them. Too bad this does not work the other way around because I am now seeing that linking, especially relative linking, has merit.

Jon