Recursive FTP?

[rob_manger]

Hi Guys,

Just a thought. What are the chances of adding a recursive feature to the FTP action?

On several of my projects I am building the contents of a CD that are to FTP'd up to a server so the client can burn these files directly to a CD, ie: no chance of Zipping up the directory structure and FTPing that. The CD directory structure is approaching ~15 sub-directories. It would be great if I could put these into one single FTP step, rather than have 15 different steps.

Cheers

Rob Manger

[kinook]

We are considering something along these lines for a future release. For now, you can reduce it to 2 steps by utilizing the Process Files action + an FTP step. The Recurse.bld sample demonstrates doing this file-by-file (you can also invoke the FTP action once for each folder by using the 'Process once for each folder...' checkbox in the Process Files action). See 'Process Files Action' in the help index for more details and also see this post: http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthread.php?threadid=240

[rob_manger]

Excellent. Thanx for your prompt reply

[briandors]

Can this process files methodology also be used for an FTP GET operation, resursively? If I have an ever-increasing number of folders and files under a certain root on the ftp server, and I always want to get everything from under there to a specific local folder, how would that be done?

Thanks.
Brian

[kinook]

No, the Process Files action only knows about local drives and LAN-accessible network shares. If you have only FTP/Telnet access to the server, one option would be to run a server-side script to ZIP up the the files (if it's a Windows server, this could be done by running a VBP project on the server via the Telnet action or rcmd/rconsole), then FTP the ZIP file and uncompress on the client side.

[briandors]

Sorry, I'm not following. Indeed I don't have remote desktop connection or admin or any other access to this server than FTP.

How would I from my client, recursively zip all files on the server, to then GET the zip?

Would be nice for gets and puts if the FTP piece had recursiveness built in. Short of getting a directory listing and then parsing out each file and folder name, I don't see a way around this.

[kinook]

My suggestion would only work if you also had Telnet access to the box. With FTP access only, you would need to use FTP commands to dir the site and parse out the folder names. You could script the Windows FTP client for that: http://www.nsftools.com/tips/MSFTP.htm

Supporting this in the FTP action is on our list for a future release.


Admin note: Implemented in v6