I often ftp files up to our web server so I can access them while on client machines. Up until now I’ve been using FireFtp a Firefox extension, which works great as an FTP client. However, I’d been getting annoyed by it for 2 reasons:
- Not being able to use keyboard shortcuts as it was hosted in a browser
- Not being able to use the Favourite links set up in explorer. About 90% of what I upload would be available in one-click from there.
So I started looking for an alternative client. What if found was even better. You can add a network location in Windows Explorer which is an ftp location and can then drag and drop files completely within Explorer.
To set it up all you need to do is select Computer in the folder view, then right click in the details pane and select "Add Network Location" and follow the wizard.
I imagine it’s present in other versions of Windows, but I’ve only tested it in Vista.
While debugging the issue in my last post, the customer pointed out the the owner of uploaded documents and created folders wasn’t being set as expected i.e. as the user logged SharePoint.
This was the result of overcoming the double-hop problem – one option is to access the file system as the SharePoint app pool, or the user defined in a configuration file. In these cases, it was this user who was set as the owner of the object. I’ve now fixed this so the owner will be the user logged into SharePoint.
I actually released a German version of My Documents a while back after a customer request. I just spent some time with them debugging an issue where files and folders weren’t getting saved. I tracked the issue down to a date time localisation issue. To check if the file/folder is present I’m using File.GetCreationTime because when impersonating a user File.Exists always returned true. GetCreationTime returns a "zero" date time if the file doesn’t exist, however it returns it in local time so when I was comparing against a manually created DateTime object it was always greater than it. Once I realised what was wrong it was easy to check properly.
Now that I’ve localised the web part once, all I need for other locales is a translation of the messages within the application, which makes it easy to get ready for other locales.