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One of the powerful features of Catalyzer is to make catalogs of files. You can import a file or folder, and make a catalog which refers to your data files. Note that links to external data files are referred to as "Resources" in Catalyzer, as resources can link to data on the web (with a http:// location or URL) as well as to local files.
But what happens if you move your files? The catalog will still be pointing at the old location of your data.
Catalyzer includes a powerful feature to reconnect the links to the new location of the files.
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| Opening the Resources dialog to relocate lost resources |
Often you'll have moved all your data files from hard disk to network drive, or onto CD, so you'll want to map resources which were on "C:/My Documents/data" to "H:data/". The resources dialog(Edit : Resources from the main menu) makes this simple. It displays a list of all external files ("Resources") referred to by the catalog. This displays an icon in Green or Red depending on whether the resource can be found.
To fix up a set of resources to the new location (e.g. you moved them from the C:/data drive to the H:/mydata/ drive), just double click on the path and type the new value.
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| Click Browse to find the new location of missing resources (shown in red) |
The dialog above is useful if you've moved all of your data from one directory to another in one go. But what if you've been doing major restructuring of your file organisation, e.g. moving them from a directories like papers/paper1.pdf to papers/2003/nature/naturepaper1.pdf. What happens to your links to data files?
You could map each file individually using the dialog above. But Catalyzer now includes an extremely powerful feature which will reattach the catalog links to your data files even if you move them - and also even if you rename them!
Click the Edit : Find Missing Resources option from the main menu. If there are any missing resuorces in the catalog, this lets you choose the list of top level directories to start the search.
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| Opening the Find Resources dialog to search for lost resources |
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| Find Resources will search through a set of directories looking for the resources |
The way this works is that when you add a link to a file, Catalyzer computes a unique identifier based on the file contents, and stores this with the link. This enables Catalyzer to scan a directory looking for the data files, and reconnect any broken links.