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Old 08-31-2004, 12:30 AM  
lax
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 18
Default Sort options when exporting dir lists

I know that there has been some discussion already about "View Raw Directory" etc., but they seem to be mostly concerned with the ability to exclude certain fields when from the raw directory listing. And generally the answer is to mark the files/directories and then export the marked list.

However, neither of these options will preserve the current directory sort options. Rather, they always default to an alphabetical sort.

By default, when listing remote directories I sort by date, descending (so as to see the newest directories at the top of the list). But if I want to export the directory list to a text file, there's no way to preserve that directory listing order. So, when referring to the list later, it looks completely different from the list I'm seeing when I browse the directory in flash.

I'll give you an example of why this can be annoying: I often am confronted with a directory containing an enormous number of subdirectories. In each folder there will be a file describing the contents of the folder, or sometimes a sample (if it's video or audio). I'll often go into each folder, starting from the most recent, and queue the description and/or sample file, then download and review them, so that I can decide what I want to download.

Since the parent directory is updated regularly, I sort the files by date so that I can see the ones that are new since the last time I logged in first.

While perusing the contents of the stuff I've downloaded, I like to have a list of the directories they came from, so that I can make a note of what I've decided I want to download. But the files/samples that I've downloaded are often not very easy at a glance to identify with their respective folders -- the folder will have the full name of whatever's in it, but the files often follow the 8.3 naming convention, and so the filenames are quite abbreviated.

Since I don't have any way of exporting the directory list such that they are listed by date, it's really difficult to figure out which files go with which folders. I have to use an app like Ultraedit32: I set it to "column mode", chop out the parts of the raw directory listing up to the date, then use the sort option to sort alphabetically (descending). However, this has its own problems -- since the dates are listed using the names of the months, rather than the month number, sorting in the manner I've just described, this will sort (for instance) July18 before July17 (as I want it to) but also before August 01 (which I don't want).

I don't have a lot of experience marking and exporting files, but from the few tests I've just done, this has the same problem.

On a related note, It'd be nice if the directories in "tree view" also sorted themselves according to the default sort options. It doesn't make sense to have them listed one way in the tree view & another way in the view pane.

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who's had this problem. If there's some workaround for this that I'm just not understanding, please let me know (and sorry for the waste of your time, if that's the case).

BTW, FFXP 3.x is a real improvement. I use flash a LOT, and I appreciate the changes you've made.
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