Advanced Tutorial 1: synchronizing my website via FTP

 

 

What you will learn with this tutorial

Prerequisites

Step 1: Setting up the synchronization view

Now you should see a 3 panels view with at left and right your data and in the bottom panel a list of actions, probably still telling 'Not yet computed' or 'Not resolved' on many items. This is normal as you did not explain yet what expect to do with the files which are different.

Step 2: Filtering the view

Filtering the view is very often is generally a very fast step which will gain you a great deal of time when comparing or synchronizing. Why? first because filtering out files or folders based on their name or presence is very simple and efficient.

Imagine that you are using a version control tool, e.g. SubVersion or CVS.

If you know a date which determines precisely a cut-off between files already synchronized and files to synchronize, e.g., the date/time just after last synchronization or the start date/time for current task, it is good idea to set up a filter using dates

 Finally let imagine that you want to update only files already existing in the FTP site:

Of course, you can hide files or folders individually using the right click menu on any item (or selection), and click Hide item, and also change your mind clicking Make item visible.
Using this filtering option makes the comparison process much faster. When you validate the options, the filtering applies at once, it may take from a fewer millisecond to many seconds on very large folder collections (many thousands). If you feel that you can easily remove many files and filtering be slow, because you first forgot to set the filter before visiting, use a full refresh command (Ctrl+F5) it will completely empty the view with only root folder loaded, then changing your options and reloading will not list uninteresting files or folders and may be much faster.

Step 3: Setting up a converter

If you are not interested yet in proprietary documents, you can safely skip this step.

The converters are program which transform proprietary formats (such as format from Adobe, Microsoft and so on...) into standard formats (such as plain text, XML, HTML or images such as JPEG, GIF, BMP...).
These converters can be set up manually, but it can be a tedious process. To avoid you that, we have introduced a feature called 'Auto-detection' in Ellié Computing Merge using the scripting engine. This feature let Ellié Computing write a small script for you (which we publish on the Add-Ons section of the website), and you just have to put it in your macros directory to get the converter configured correctly.
Remember, that mostly all the options in Ellié Computing Merge are per-session (i.e. per document): you can publish these options to Options Set and reuse them, but nothing forces you to do that.

Step 4: Generating a HTML report

If you are not interested yet in generating comparison reports, you can safely skip this step.

Before synchronizing your website, let generate a HTML report of the comparison, it will let a nice snapshot of what was to be changed be the synchronization. Here you will have to determine what you want to generate exactly, Ellié Computing Merge has many options and though the pre-selected options match most users' needs. You may feel that they do not.

Step 5: Running the synchronization visually

Here you have two situations with two different technics to synchronize:

Step 6: Running the synchronization from the command line

 Use the same process a Step 5 'you know that the synchronization process will always be the same', but instead of running the job:

We hope that you found this tutorial useful and that you learnt several features. If you think that we could improve this tutorial, please contact us at info@elliecomputing.com or create a ticket on our website.