Ever tried to find that program or file and given up because you can’t and it's already taken an hour or so, then you need DiscScan. DiscScan’s purpose is too keep track of the contents of floppy discs, hard drives, CD Roms, etc. so that when you want to find an item you can quickly find out which disc it's one.
Important
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DiscScan must not be run from a read only filing system, i.e. a CD Rom or Archive, as it need's to be able to write back to it's self.
Scanning a disc
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To scan a disc you need to load DiscScan and then click on the DiscScan icon on the icon bar with Select (the left button). A window should open with two writable icon's at the top and a group of twelve radio icons at the bottom.
Give the disc you want to scan a unique id, and put it in the disc drive and and type the unique id in the top writable icon. In the bottom writable icon type a discription of what the contents of the disc are. Chose which section you want to store the disc under.
Example;
If you got an applications disc with your computer you would place that in the 'Acorn' section or an Acorn User magazine cover disc would go in to the 'Acorn User' group.
If you decide that you don't want to scan the whole disc you can also scan a sub-directory by it's self. To do this open the main menu by click with MENU (the middle button) over the main window and going to the 'Scan path' sub menu. Enter the full path name of the directory here and press RETURN.
Examples;
ADFS::0.$.Stuff
IDEFS::4.$.PC.PC_DriveC
SCSI::8.$.Apps.Editors.Impression
ADFS::4.$.Work.David.Work
There is also an exception's system for scanning a disc which is defined in the choices.. window. The exception's system allows special actions to be taken against certain items when they are scanned.
Hints
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To help you there are two menu icons to the right of each writable icon. Clicking on these with SELECT will open a menu from where you can select a commonly used item.
You should scan any new discs that you intend to keep as soon as they arrive as this will keep DiscScan's database up to date.
Searching for an item
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After a while of using DiscScan you will want to find an item. This can be done from the Search window which you can open from the main window's menu. There are three sections in this window. The first is at the top and it is where you type in the name or part of it that you want to seach for. You also decide if the search should be case-sensitive or not.
The second section is on the left. This is where you decide whether you want to limit the search to only a specific kind of file. You will need to select the tick box at the top of the section if you want to. You can then enter the file type to search for and decide whether what you entered was a Dos extension so that only PC files will be searched.
The final section is where you decide what sort of search to do. You can search all the sections starting with the first, going to the last. Search just a single section that was selected in the main window or start the search with the section that is selected in the main window and then contiune to the last section.
To start the search you need to either press RETURN or click on the search icon at the bottom of the window.
Once the search has begun the mouse pointer will change to an hourglass. Once an item has been found or the search has found the found window will open in the found window will be all the details about the disc and the items details. There will also be four icons at the bottom of the window.
'Stop' stops the search, 'Continue' will continue the search and start looking for the next match, 'Retry' doesn't do much. 'Run Item' will try to run the item that was found. If it was in an archive and ArcFS/SparkFS is not loaded that an error message will appear. You also need to ensure that the disc is in the same dirve as when it was scanned to use 'Run Item'.
Browser
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Bored or can't remember the name enough to search then you can use the browser. This is opened from the main window's menu and consists of two windows. It displays the contents of the section that is chosen in the main window. The smaller window is the tool bar which controls the browser's display.
The browser has it's own menu. Where you can decide the colours of each item in the display. And from where you can 'Update' or 'Alter' the information of the record showing. Update will rescan the disc after giving you the chose of whether or not to charge any of the information.
Choices
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The Choices window can be opened from the icon bar menu. Perhapes the most inportant part of the Choices window is the top section where you can alter the information about the sections. On the left is where you enter the name of the section. To the right of the section's name is where you decide whether to open any applications that are in the root directory of the scan path.
The writable icon on the right is where you define the exceptions string for the section. The exceptions string is a list of file names seperated by a full stop. You can define them by dragging an item on to the writable icon.
During a scan where a disc is going to be put in to a section with an exceptions string. DiscScan will cheak the items on the disc with the string and if there is a match a special action will be taken.
If the item is a ??? then ???? will happen.
File It will not be stored in section.
Directory It will not be scanned.
Application If it's in the root directory and The section is told to scan applications in the root directory then it *will not* be scanned. If it is in any other directory it *will* be scanned.
There are also some other Choices for scanning, the browser, and some miscellanious Choices. For scanning you can chose whether to scan any archive or not. You can also set what the minium version of ArcFS DiscScan will use is and whether it asks about any unknown DOS extensions that it finds.
For the browser you can choose whether you can have to use SELECT or ADJUST (Right button) mouse click on the icon bar icon to open the browser. Whether the borwser gets updated when you change the section selected in the main window and whether the browser changes once a search has been found.
File information
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You can use DiscScan in a limited way to identify any unknown files by dragging the file on to the icon bar with the Ctrl key held down. If you find a file that is not known by DiscScan you can add it to the list of the file types that are known by selecting the 'Add file info' menu item from the icon bar menu.
A new window will open and you can then drag the file on to it to enter some of the data. If the file type is already known then the current description is put in to the bottom writable icon. Entering a text description in to the bottom icon and clicking on add will add/change the file type information.
The dos extension of a file is used in prefenence to the the Risc OS file type.If the control key is held down the Risc OS file type is always used.
Still to work on
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• Get DiscScan to work with SparkFS.
• Add a ‘Move’ function to the Edit submenu.
• Add a ‘Sort’ function to the Edit submenu.
• Allow drags on to Choices window to set Choices.
• Improve the search so you can find free space on a disc. Also enter the text description for a file type from a menu? instead of an obcurce number.
Problems and Werid Actions...
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• BASIC only allows the scan path to be 256 charecters long. If there are two many sub-directories DiscScan can crash.
• Archives that are stored on a disc where there are a number of disc errors where an archive is being stored can cause the error "String too long" which crashes DiscScan.
• Dos files that are on Risc OS format discs can be a problem if they don’t have their full file extension present because of it being truncated when the file was copied. It can mean that a file with the filename ‘TextFile/T’ will be stored as having a file extension of ‘T’ when it
