The Path Plan Editor

The Path Plan Editor appears at the bottom of every Eluent Tools Task Dialog Box and is shown below editing a Path Plan named "Backup", which could be used with Eluent Dir to produce a list of filenames to be used as input for a backup program.

Path Plan Management

The top row of controls is concerned with Path Plan management and allows you to save Path Plans, rename them, delete them, import and export them to text files, etc. Clicking on the Active Label "Path Plan", , or pressing Shift+Alt+P drops down a menu which contains all the management options.

The Path Rule List

The Path Rule List contains the individual Path Rules, which specify, at a minimum, where to begin the search. Several types of Path Rules are illustrated above:

1. @P Web Projects This Path Rule is an @ Rule which specifies a Path Plan called "Web Projects". It's possible for one Path Plan to include another by name, and that's what this rule does.
2. <MyDocuments>\ This Path Rule ends in a backslash and thus specifies a folder, in this case, the Windows Shell Folder identified by MyDocuments. This maps to the current user's "documents" folder, wherever it is, and whatever it's named. (Windows 95, 98, and 2000 call it "My Documents", while Windows NT calls it "Personal", and it can have other names.) Many other Shell Folders can be referred to like this, including Favorites (Internet Favorites), Desktop (your desktop), and AppData (common location for application-specific data). Similarly, you can refer to environment variables by %var%, where var is the variable name, and you can refer to all your local hard drives by using <LocalDrives>.
3. C:\bin\*.bat, *.cmd, *.pl, *.reg This Path Rule returns the files in C:\bin matched by the rule's Mask List, a list of filename masks or wildcards. It's possible to create named Mask Lists, called Mask Sets, much as you create named Path Plans. For example, if this rule's Mask List was represented by a Mask Set named "Command Scripts", we could have written the rule as C:\bin\Command Scripts.

Note the editing toolbar in Path Rule 3. It's Menu icon, , opens a menu from which you can select files, folders, Shell Folders, Path Plans, Mask Sets, and Visual C++ Rules. (You can also open this menu by right-clicking in the edit box.) The toolbar's and icons open dialog boxes from which you can select folders and files, respectively, and you can also drag objects from Explorer windows into the Path Rule List.

Filters

The bottom part of the Path Rule Editor is concerned with Filters, which modify the meaning of the Path Rules. The Folder Depth field controls folder recursion depth for Folder Rules that don't override it, while the Masks field does the same thing for file masks. Path Rule (3) above specifies its own masks, so the Masks field doesn't apply to it. Clicking on the Active Label "Masks", , or pressing Shift+Alt+M drops down a menu from which you can choose Mask Sets, which are named collections of masks, and open the Mask Set Editor, which allows you to edit and manage Mask Sets, much like you manage Path Plans in the Path Plan Editor.

The Advanced button opens a dialog box in which you can filter the search results in the following ways:

• By timestamp. You can filter based on the Last Write, Creation, and Last Access times, for intervals of the last n days, weeks, months, etc., before or after an absolute time, or between two absolute times.
• By file size. 
• By file attributes. You can include and exclude files based on the presence of the Archive, Hidden, Read-Only, System, Compressed, Encrypted, and Not Content Indexed attributes, in various combinations.
• By issuing a Windows Indexing Service query.

The Exceptions button opens a dialog box in which you specify files and folders you want to exclude from the search results. Most of the Path Rule features are available here, including Mask Lists and Sets, environment variable expansion, and Shell Folder variable expansion. 

Using Path Plans

The Path Plan Editor allows you to create unnamed Path Plans for one-off usage, and you can select single, named Path Plans for use by an Eluent Tool. To search on more than one named Path Plan without creating a new one, or to filter a Path Plan without editing it, you need the Path Plan Chooser.