How to move mountains within your folder structure using scanEZ

Moving or editing hundreds of subfolders may seem like a herculean task if you’re tackling it one subfolder at a time. Luckily, for those of us who like to work smart rather than hard, scanEZ lets us accomplish this and more. And since some of our customers recently asked about managing large numbers of folders with scanEZ, we thought a quick blog post would be in order.

Although scanEZ is mainly about documents, the fact that it handles the back-end of both documents and designs makes it the perfect tool to work with designs when it comes to non-production development work or application support.

Let’s go through a couple of scenarios that we believe might be helpful for both administrators and developers.

• Renaming a large amount of folders
• Re-structuring folders on a mass-scale

You can also check out a previous blog post where we presented quite a complex scenario that involves manually upgrading the folder design in an application using scanEZ.

The first example is from a customer who needed to rename multiple folders by replacing a certain string in the folder names, and he did not want to do it manually.
This feat is not only possible, but is in fact quite easy to achieve using scanEZ. The only tricky thing to keep in mind is that for a folder design note there are two items that need to be modified when changing names: the $Title and $Name items.
In this scenario, we have 10 folders called a1, a2, a3, … a10 that need to be renamed to b1, b2, b3, … b10.

Step 1: Find and put all these folders into a new MySelection folder.
Using the Designs category, we can quickly locate the Folders group containing all folder class notes. In this category we can use the “Select using Regular Expression” function to locate and checkbox-select all folders containing “a”.

Step 2: Once we selected the right folders, we can put them into a new MySelection folder using the Checkbox Selection menu.

Step 3: We can then do a “Diff” on these folders and select the “$Title” item for modification. Since using the @Formula modification will evaluate the selected formula and write the return value into the selected (in our case $Title) item as its new value, we will need to add another line to ensure we write the same value into the $Name item as well.

In this particular scenario, having selected the $Title item, we can use the following formula to make the necessary changes:

_res:=@If(!@Contains($title;”\\”);@ReplaceSubstring($title;”a”;”b”);@LeftBack($title;”\\”)+
“\\”+@ReplaceSubstring(@RightBack($title;”\\”) ;”a”;”b”));
FIELD $Name := _res;
_res;

Note that this formula will just make changes to the final folder name. For instance, if the folder is called a\a\a1, we will change this to a\a\b1. However if there is no structure (for example, if we are modifying folders called a1, a2, a3 etc… with no root), it will still proceed with the changes and change the folder names to b1, b2, b3, etc.

A related question that also came up was in regards to re-structuring subfolders, and whether if it was possible to move 100 subfolders belonging to a certain folder to another folder, all in one shot.

In this scenario, let’s work with 10 folders called a1, a2, a3, … a10 that belong to the parent folder “folder1\folder2″. In fact, these folders are physically called “folder1\folder2\a1″, “folder1\folder2\a2″, “folder1\folder2\a3″, etc…
We want to move all these folders to another folder called “folder1\folder3″.

Step 1: Find and put all subfolders into a new MySelection folder.
This is in fact quite easy using the Design category in scanEZ, and by expanding the Folders section. We can then use the Regex selection to get all subfolders into a new MySelection.

Step 2: We will use the Modify function to input the formula that will help us set the values for the appropriate items. In our case, we’ll want to replace the “folder2″ part of the folder paths with “folder3″ in both the $Title and $Name items for all folders.

As usual, for the Modify feature we will need to select the item to write the return value into. Let’s use the $Title item.

Like in the previous scenario, we will also need to modify the $Name item. Here is the formula to be used:

_res := @Implode(@Replace(@Explode($title; “\\”); “folder2″;”folder3″);”\\”);
FIELD $Name := _res;
_res

Note that this formula will allow us to change any folder names in the structure.

For example, if we’d like to change the folder structure on the upmost level, we can even change “folder1″ to “folder4″ in order to move “folder1\folder2\a1″ to “folder4\folder2\a1″ like this:

_res := @Implode(@Replace(@Explode($title; “\\”); “folder1″;”folder4″);”\\”);
FIELD $Name := _res;
_res

We hope that these two examples will facilitate overcoming future hurdles. But if you do find yourself facing tasks that feel like Mount Everest or Mount Kilimanjaro, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d be happy to guide you through any steep climb!