FlashFXP multi site help/guidance please - possible business site license purchase

[parthaboy]

Hi Bigstar,

I am a long time personal user of FlashFXP ( bought it in 2006, you can please check your database for my purchase details to verify my claim) and is right now planning to coax my company site admin to purchase a business license for FlashFXP cause IMHO this is the best FTP/FXP software ever created in this field. Do understand that even though I am a long time user, I have only used FlashFXP for simple things like logging into a FTP site and downloading some files form there. What I am trying to do now is a bit more complex and if it works out , I will probably be able to secure a sale of business license for FlashFXP. So here is what I looking FlashFXP to do

1.Connect to multiple FTP sites as defined in the Site Manager at the same time for upload and downloads, either non-stop or scheduled based.

2.For upload purposes, for - each destination site, we will have a different folder containing the files to upload. What I would ideally like is scheduling each site individually. Right now I see an option in Tools --> Schedule but I am confused with this feature and not sure how to use it on a per site basis. Please provide guidance to me in this regard. This is very important that I am able to schedule upload/download on a per site basis.

3. For each file that is uploaded, make a copy of the file and save it in in the SENT folder on a per site basis. In other words, each site has a SENT folder where we copy the files that is sent to each client, and we like to copy each file SENT out in this SENT folder. For each file that is successfully uploaded, if we move files automatically to the SENT folder from the source folder, then the chance of uploading the duplicate file(s) to the client is eliminated. This is also very important to us as we don't want duplicate files to be uploaded to the client. Right now we are using DOS batch files to move files to the SENT folder and this is quite ugly as DOS command prompts keep on flying in your face every time a file is getting uploaded to the client.

4. Would like per site based logging too - Is it possible to get per site based logging ? Also right now I see logging is what looks like logs saved in text file in the global log folder, is it possible in near future that we can log in into a SQL database ? ( SQL database logging is not the most vital thing for my company right now )

If all these things are possible, please advise me regarding this and I will try it with my companies test servers, and if all good, I will do my humble best to secure a business license for FlashFXP. Ours being a small tight knit company, chances are it will get approved. May be one or two other things may come up in this coarse of testing, but I will ask you for guidance too in this regard, hope you don't mind.

Thanking you

[bigstar]

1. You can connect to multiple sites by starting multiple instances of FlashFXP or by running multiple scheduled tasks in parallel.

2. If you wanted to schedule each site individually this will work, plus an added benefit of this is that you can enable logging per scheduled task (not quite per-site but it would have a similar effect). But you could also create a single queue involving multiple sites as well.

The first step in using the task scheduler is to create a transfer queue containing the operations you want to perform and then save this to a file. Since you are thinking about a single schedule per site you'll need to create a separate queue file for each site, if the structure for each site is identical then you can take a shortcut by simply creating a copy of the queue file and then editing it via the queue window > right-click > edit and change the servers used and then save the queue as a new file.

You can enqueue file transfers, file operations, as well as custom commands/scripts.

If you wanted to transfer c:\outgoing\* to \server\incoming\*

You would queue the local c:\outgoing\ folder as "incoming" while in the desired \server\ folder on the remote.
(right-click on the file list > Advanced Transfer > Queue As)

Then you mentioned wanting to move transferred items into a sent folder.
(right-click on the file list > Enqueue > Move Folder Content)

So the queue would look like this
https://oss.azurewebsites.net/images/forum/flashfxp-upload-and-move-folder-content.png
(While creating this example I found a drawing bug in the queue window, after the 'Enqueue > Move Folder content operation' the queue window failed to update the display. I will release an fix for this later today or over the weekend.)

Now once you have the queue created save it to a file.

Now we can create our scheduled task.
(Tools > Schedule)

From the Scheduled task window click the New Task button.

[New Task\General Tab]

Give the task a name and then select the queue file that we just created above.

File Transfer Rules, the default is to use the current global/per-site transfer rules, or you can override them with a custom set of rules.
(When a queue is run from a scheduled task no confirmation prompts are shown, that being said the "ASK" prompt is not displayed and the file is overwritten instead. I am not sure how well this is documented so I am mentioning it here.)

[New Task\Schedule Tab]
Define how often you want the task to run, repeat, etc.

[New Task\Logging]
You'll probably want to Enable logging and etc

(You can uncheck the "Task Enabled" checkbox to run the tasks manually via the Task Scheduler too if desired)

Once you've made the desired changes click the Save button to finish creating the new task.

4. Per-site logging, when transferring files outside of a scheduled task you'll want to enable global logging and check the setting 'store logs in unique session folders'.
(Options > Preferences > Logging)

A queue file or session instance of FlashFXP can involve file transfers on multiple sites and to separate these operations per-site across multiple instances of FlashFXP would be a bit of a nightmare to mange and review.

This is why we group the logs to a single sessions or scheduled task.

[parthaboy]

Thanks very much for your reply Bigstar. I will go through you reply and try it coming week and see how it goes :). Thanks again.