Error Report At The Start Of An Upload, Not During Or Towards The End

[leehack]

If you have duplicate image names in different subfolders, actinic obviously doesn't like this because it uploads them all into the acatalog folder. I like the check and it's good that it is done, problem is it is done far too late in the process and should be one of the first things done.

Make the first part of the upload process the check, that way we can watch to make sure that all goes through OK and then leave our desk or do some other work. The problem is exacerbated by actinic's failure to relay when there has been an error suffered, if you do not have it as your active application screen. You think it's uploading in the background, but switch back after however many minutes to find it has completely stopped and isn't in fact.

I don't understand why images are sent last either, that means a page can be live without its images, sounds backwards to me, if the images are all uploaded first, then as the page is loaded, it is complete and functioning.

So in summary, do things in this order:

1. Check for duplicate images or duplicate page names (if any found help us find them!)
2. Then load all images
3. Then load all pages

It's incredibly unlikely that an image loaded before its page will create any problems, it is however an almost certainty to have incomplete pages without images, using the current method.

[Steve G Griggs]

Brilliant idea--why didn't I think of that one. (No answers please--I can think of a few myself).

[brucet]

At the moment, the list of files to be uploaded is built up by parsing the pages as they are generated. This ensures that image links outside the Actinic database, eg in an external style sheet, also get picked up.

As you know, the site generation and upload process is now multi-threaded, to reduce upload times. Consequently, by the time the software knows which image files to upload, many of the site pages have been uploaded already.

Ideally we would maintain a database of files used, but that would create performance bottlenecks in other areas. For example, every time an outer layout was edited. the software would have to check whether the change affected the file list, and update the list if it did.

In theory I guess it might be possible to rework the sequence and upload related files immediately after parsing each page, followed by the page itself; then keep a running record to prevent duplicate uploads. But it would certainly be slower, and probably more risky. TBH, since we ironed out the initial bugs and got multi-threading working well overall, we're a bit loathe to tinker with it other than to fix any specific bugs that might show up.

So it's a completely fair point, but not easy to make it better without making something else worse.

[Duncan Rounding]

I would like an option for Actinic to skip duplicated files and other issues that pause the upload and then instead create an upload log file that can be viewed afterwards.