Add files/direcotries to Active Edits

It's possible to add single files to the Active-Edits-list by right-click => Advanced Transfer => Edit and Upload

Currently I select every file and do this to get them into the "Active Edits" list.
Then I close the standard editor with which the files are opened, because I use Netbeans and the files are edited there.

Could you please add an additional entry into the menu which allows to only "track" the file, instead of open and track it?

It would be also very cool if the user could select more than one file to get it into the list.

The highes level of usability / comfortability could be reached by allowing also directories with their sub-directories to be added to the Active Edits list.


For now, I would be very appreciated if you could implement my first thought: track the file without open it. Even better: if you also could add an shortcut for this new entry.

Thank you very much.

What are you trying to achieve by doing that?

What do you mean?
That's a feature request and I'm requesting an additional entry in the right-click menu which will improve the usability.

The Active edits feature was never intended to be a replacement for a type of directory/file watch monitor, though using the "Edit & upload" feature it can in a sense work that way.

This feature incurs quite a bit of overhead due to the method we must use to detect if the file is modified, there are other methods of detecting when a file has changed but these methods aren't 100% reliable.

This is also why we ended up changing the remote edit feature to exclude "edit and uploads" in the saved edit history by default and made it a separate optional setting (include "edit and uploads" in the edit history) for customers who still want to use it.

I'm not sure if it would make sense to add this type of ability based on the overhead and limitations that we have experienced.

We had planned on adding a directory/file watch monitoring system separate from the "remote edits" and that is still on our TODO list. However unless we use a different method or come up with ways to resolve the limitations we see in the remote edits feature it would stuffer from the same performance and overhead issues.

I think the remote edit feature still has lots of room for improvement, but its difficult to make improvements without being able to predict if the changes will actually work for everyone. Even in the latest release I am not 100% certain if its working properly for everyone.

This is certainly something that can and will be investigated and explored further in the near future.

Thank you for the detailed information.
Now I better understand the reason why this feature "hidden" in the right-click menu.

I wish you success by re-implementing this feature and hope that this will be took soon

Don't get me wrong, it is a very usable feature in FlashFXP and we aren't trying to hide it.

However if FlashFXP is watching say 50+ files you'll notice an increase in CPU usage and disk access, the increase depends on the system hardware and the storage device where the files are located.

Its very impractical to continuously poll a file to check to see if its been modified, the ideal solution is to have a call back notification event that is triggered from the file system on file change, but we've dealt with customers troubleshooting this feature where this method didn't work and wasn't reliable.

For 30 days I used watchDirectory.
They use Windows Messages to get informed by changes.
As far as I remember they register their service on a windows observer which informs them when files change.

Maybe you can try this application to find out how they solved the problem.

I have quite a bit of knowledge on how the different methods work, and the pros and cons between them, as does the person who wrote this app, they provided an option to allow the user to choose which method to use should the default method fail to work properly.

And that may be a solution we end up implementing for a folder watching feature.

As I said the problem with using the event notification method is that it doesn't always work, making it an option is one way to do it. off by default of course.

The active edits feature uses polling and its not practical to poll a large number of files because its wasting/hogging system resources.