den4b Forum

JeremyNicoll

Member

From: Edinburgh, Scotland

Registered: 2010-10-08

Posts: 9

Installer or portable version for use with DropBox?

There's no guidance on the downloads page for ReNamer as to whether one should choose the installer or zip/portable version.

I chose the portable one, because I thought that might fit my situation better, but I'm not sure it does.  What situation?  Well I plan to use ReNamer on three computers, all currently running Windows XP.  I use 'DropBox' ( http://www.dropbox.com ) who provide software that lets you keep a folder on one or more computers entirely in-sync, as well as providing an online backup copy of the files.  Although each machine has most apps installed in C:\Program Files\... some things, mainly command-line tools and portable apps are placed in folder(s) within the DropBox folder.

If I do this with ReNamer then each machine would have its own copy of ReNamer in, say:

machine 1:   D:\My Dropbox\Tools\ReNamer\ReNamer.exe                              etc
machine 2:   C:\My Dropbox\Tools\ReNamer\ReNamer.exe                              etc
machine 3:   C:\Somewhere\Else\My Dropbox\Tools\ReNamer\ReNamer.exe      etc

(The disk hierarchies containg the DropBox are different because some machines are multi-disk, all have different disk capacities, and so on.  However because of the DropBox software, the contents of each DropBox are the same, and are kept that way.) 

Now I assume that whether I use the installer or portable versions, if I configure Windows Explorer shell extensions each system will know where that system's ReNamer app is?  And - if configured, which it would be - the .rnp file extension will be associated with the app.  So far so good.

As far as I can tell each machine's ReNamer will store its Presets in    ...\Tools\ReNamer\Presets\   which is ok - I'll only be wanting to put generic (not machine-specific) routines into Presets so it's ok that DropBox will keep all the Presets in sync too.

But the ReNamer.ini file - which also seems to get placed in ...\Tools\ReNamer\   - contains machine-specific information - specifically in the section

[Last]
...
AddFilesDir=C:\Documents and Settings\machine1user\Desktop\...
AddFoldersDir=C:\Documents and Settings\machine1user\...

The problem for me is that having the .ini file synced by DropBox means each time one machine re-saves its .ini file, it will appear on the other machines, replacing whatever they most recently stored in the same file.

If I 'solve' that by not having ReNamer in a DropBox folder, then I also lose the multi-machine syncing of the Presets subfolder.

If on the other hand I install the app in a standard(ish) way, putting it eg into C:\Program Files\wherever   then I'm wondering if the app supports configurable specification of where Presets should be stored (since I suspect they won't be in C:\Program Files, as later versions of Windows don't let user data live there), and presumably also its .ini file..   However even if the .ini file and \Presets are held elsewhere (eg in \Application data\ReNamer\  ?) that still won't work well for me because nothing will automatically keep the \Presets in sync.

What I'm hoping for is that there might be a possibility of a new entry in the .ini file, specifying where that machine keeps its Presets.  Then I could keep ReNamer (the app, .ini file and help, scripts & translits files) in a machine-specific non-DropBox location, but tell each copy of the app to find its \Presets in   %JN_DROPBXRT%\Tools\ReNamerPresets\    - note the use of the OS environment variable saying where I (JN=me) keep the DropBox on each system.

Advice welcome!