Changing Paths

A good friend of mine has asked me if I can help him with a problem that he has, and I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice, please.

My friend is the engineer at a processing dairy and he wants to improve the ease with which his engineers can access technical manuals when they need to know information for maintaining machines etc.

Currently all the pdfs (probably hundreds) are stored in an "engineering folder on one of the PCs on their site network" and he's considering purchasing "tough" tablets for the maintenance guys to carry round with them so that they have the information at hand, but he wants to improve the ease with which the correct pdf can be found and read.

As such, he's considering a " web style" front end which would be designed to allow "drilling down" to get to the correct pdf easily and quickly and has asked me if I can have a look at the problem, and I'm think about using Web Designer for this task.

Initial thoughts are that the engineering folder could be copied to a usb hard drive, so that the development work could be done and tested "away from site", which I don't think would be a problem, however, it does mean that the "path information" to where each pdf will eventually be stored will be different to the paths on the development PC, and there will probably be hundreds of these "paths" that will need to be changed once the development has been finished.

My instinct would be to use a "Find and Replace" command to change all the paths at the end of development, and I think this would have worked in the days when html web pages could be written using notepad, but not so sure that that will be the case now.

If anyone has any thoughts, I would really appreciate them.

Thanks.

You can hide the base path in a javascript function if that is what you need. See example.
Off course the links will not work in the example because they reference local files on my system.

Why would the paths have to be different? For example if you placed all the pdf's in a folder on the usb drive, then your Xara drill down site could point to this pdf folder.

Thanks for the quick replies.

I've done a little research since asking the question and I've used Web Designer 6 to test it out. (I also have Photo and Graphic Designer V7 and V11, but notice that V11 seems to have become less of a web site design tool.)

I created a simple web page with 2 simple text links (using link to file pdf, avi etc) to 2 pdf files that are currently sitting on my "desktop", then exported the web site and looked at what was created.

Inside the subfolder "index_htm_files", I was quite surprised to find the two pdf files that I had created the links to .... in other words exact copies of the files on the desktop. Just to check, I did the same with Photo and Graphic Designer 7 and it did exactly the same.

I'm not exactly sure what to make of this at it means that the "index_htm_files" folder will get huge as the web site grows because it will store a copy of all the pdf files that are referenced by the web site , but on the other hand, at least the pdf files will travel with any usb drive or or other type of storage drive.

Hmmmm .......

Hi Colin,

You don't need to have the pdf's in the index_htm_folder. Just have your links point to a folder on your usb drive that holds the pdf files.

Hi Egg,

I've tried that, and the results I got are as shown (using Photo and Graphic Designer 7)

I copied a 21 Mb PDF onto the route directory of a USB thumb drive and set up two folders - one to save the Xar file into and one to export the website into.

I then created a page in Xara with a single text link to the pdf on the thumbdrive and then saved it to the thumb drive as Link Trial.xar

I then exported the website to the thumb drive.

What I discovered was that there are now three copies of the PDF on the thumb drive as shown in the attached grahics.

1. The original pdf in the route directory of the thumb drive.
2. In the Link Trial_xar_files sub folder of the folder that I saved the xar file into
3. In the index_htm_files sub folder of the website folder.

The thumb drive now shows 67 Mb used - 3 copies of the original 21 Mb file and some for luck.

I don't seem to be able to get Xara to "just link" without creating copies of the file that I'm linking to.

Thanks.

PS. It doesn't seem to do that if I link to a file with an internet address.

I think what Egg meant was that if you create a folder along with your website then you can link directly to a subfolder and do not need to link to every individual file.
For example if you have a folder pdfs and inside of that a folder 01 you can open a browser window for that folder:

My tuppence-worth.

In the root of wherever you are placing the site, create an "engineering" folder to hold all the PDF files.
If you have a USB stick with this folder then you simply locally export the Xara site to the same level the "engineering" folder is to check it all works.

You can then move the site and "engineering" folder to a DVD, another hard drive or publish to the web - all without changing anything.
All links to the PDF files will simply be Web Properties > Link > Link to Web or Email address as "engineering/«filename».pdf".

The PDF files don't even need to be present or exist, as far as the Xara design file is concerned; simply ensure the "engineering" folder is there at the end.

Acorn

Ah, yes, you're absolutely right ..... great stuff.

As you rightly say, the key is understanding that where it says "Link to Web or Email address", that this can also mean a location on the local drive.

Many thanks to all for your valued help .... that's made things a lot clearer and easier for me to work out how to proceed.

Brilliant.

Quote:

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that this can also mean a location on the local drive

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Yes but it has to be in the same folder or sub-folder, you can't link it to another seperate folder on the same drive due to security issues.

Here's how a screengrab of the folder looks. Notice no pdf's in the index_htm_files

Many thanks to all for your help.

I'm thinking that, when finished, the best way to "roll this out" onto tablets would be by just copying the files onto an SD card and am wondering if Windows 10 tablets might be the better option for the engineers as I assume that they would have a "more normal" drive and file structure than an Android tablet ?

I tried it on my android phone. No sucsess, see screen grab.

Thanks for that .... Windows 10 it is then. Must try and get hold of one and see if it works.