Why so much trouble to get filetype sorting to work?

from Stardock Forums

So I was about to buy fences, but I figured I'd go ahead and try the trial, and I had enough trouble doing what I'm about to detail that I just had to post here. So this is either going to be a bit of a critique, or it's going to result in someone going "You are the biggest dummy head I have ever seen, this is how you should actually be doing that". I am genuinely hoping for the latter because I'd like this program to be viable for me.

 

So I installed Fences and let it slap together the few default fences. Looks nice. I decide I could use a fence for images and music & video so I make them and then open up the menu to configure it. Under sorting and organizing I see that the first entry is "All new icons go to the general desktop". This genuinely confused me for a moment but after noticing the use of "icon" throughout this section I realized that this software uses "icon" as the name for a file on the desktop as opposed to just "file". I actually really dislike this, but whatever. Anyway I then link up the default rules "Program Shortcuts", "Folders", "Documents", "Music & Video", and "Images" to their respective fences. I hit apply rules now and see that it sorted all but one of the images on my desktop. I notice the image is a .webp file and after a bit of clicking around I edit the rule for Images and add ", webp" to include it. Pretty easy.

Then I decide It'd be nice to have .c files go into a fence called programming. I've been learning C and it's easy to save little source code files on my desktop. Some super basic organization via fences would be nice. So after making my new fence I click "Send certain file types to different places" (I like that it doesn't say "icon types", it's inconsistent with everything else though) and make my rule "The icon's type / is / c". I hit okay and now have a rule titled "Icons whose type is 'c'". I assign it to a fence and it doesn't work, .c files get thrown into the default fence titled "Files and Documents". Soon I find that after hitting okay it's actually saving the rule as "The icon's type / is / Compressed file". So c is being changed to compressed file and the automatically named rule doesn't even reflect that. After adding a comma after c it saves properly.. but still doesn't work. At this point I think to myself, "Okay, I guess they have some extensions such as .c included in the default "Documents" rule, which is the only rule that is putting anything into the default fence called "Files and Documents", that will be really easy to remove, just as easy as me adding webp to images earlier." Well there is no c extension in that rule. But get this.. If you take out every extension in that rule that simply contains the letter c, then that rule no longer gets in the way of my rule ..but now the default music rule does. ..and if you take out every extension in the music rule that contains the letter c, then you now have no problems.

Obviously that's not viable and I didn't keep it that way. I found two better solutions, neither ideal. My first one was to use the rule order setting. I have two issues with this, the first one being that 1: I don't actually know what order the rules in this list are executing in - if I had to guess I would say they are executing in top to bottom order, which would cause rules on the bottom to overwrite ones on the top. But some programs would execute the rules from bottom to top, so you would say that the top rules have "precedence", they would overwrite the ones below them. Now problem 2: is that I technically don't know how this works regardless of which order the rules are executed. Perhaps once a rule places a file into a fence, a later executed rule won't move this file even if the file fits into this rule. ..I just don't know. Regardless of how it actually works, I found that if I moved my c rule to the top of the list that solved the problem. I don't see why I should have to mess with the rule order for a filetype that has no other rules that should conflict with it, but whatever (Actually I do see why, it seems that the rules here are very relevant because somehow the default Documents and Music & Videos rules are including the c filetype when they have a filetype extension containing the letter c in their list.)

The other way I found to fix the issue was to add a second criteria to the Documents and Music & Videos rules, stating that "The icon's type / is not / c,". You cannot however do this to the default rules, so you have to uncheck them, and make your own by copying the filetypes they cover. This is dumb and you would have to edit these rules any time you want to add a new filetype rule that gives you trouble, so re-ordering the rules is likely the better option.

So am I doing something majorly wrong or is this something that might should be worked on?

fences
5,180 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Hello,

I have forwarded your problem to Stardock Support team for their assistance. Please keep an eye on this thread for any updates. We appreciate your feedback and patience.

 

Basj

Stardock Community Assistant.

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

Dutch,

Sorry to hear you are having trouble.

While the length and commentary makes this somewhat difficult to follow, I have two suggestions.

Try a 'name-based' rule and consider a naming convention that includes more than just 'c' as that would capture more than what is intended.  For example, every file might be:

somethingProg.c

Ending every file with 'prog.c' would work like so:

https://cdn.stardock.us/support/uploads/2019-05-15_09-21-07.mp4

Another suggestion would be to save to a folder on your drive and use a folder portal to get to it instead of a regular Fence:

https://cdn.stardock.us/support/uploads/2019-05-15_09-23-27.mp4

With that, every file you save to that location will show up in that Fence immediately. 

Hope this helps.

----------------
Sean Drohan
Stardock Customer Service Manager

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

Hi, sorry to make it hard to follow, maybe this will be more clear to understand the behavior of the issue.

 

If you were to delete your fences, delete your custom rules, reset your default rules, uncheck whatever default rules are applying, and then use "Perform automatic layout" under "Layout & snapping", you would be at basically the same point as installing Fences for the first time and letting it do the automatic layout when it prompts you. One thing to note here is that (If I recall correctly), none of the rules are enabled after doing this. What I mean by this is that doing the automatic layout will give you fences named "Programs", "Folders", and "Files & Documents" (at least that's what it does for me), and it will move related files into those fences, but it actually does not enable the relevant rules - so if you drag some files out and then hit "Apply rules now" under "Sorting & organizing", the files will just stay on the desktop, not get moved into their relevant automatically made fences. It's just a one time sort. Obviously enabling the rules to move the files back to the proper fences after clicking apply rules is a great idea; and there seem to be rules made just for these generated fences (or rather the fences are made for these rules), they have the same or nearly the same titles, and while they don't always do it for me, the rules often auto-select the proper automatically generated fence just from me clicking the checkbox to enable them.

 

If you were to follow that.. order of operations.. then I think from this point on you would see my issue from the best angle. In your video you do not have any rules set other than the one you made. So it works, but in this scenario so does the clear cut solution of using the "Send certain file types to different places" button and setting up a basic rule to send c files to a specific fence. Neither the obvious solution or your solution work if you want to also use the default rules, which you would of course want to do to sort the bulk of the files that end up on your desktop. These default rules (and it doesn't actually have to be the defaults, you can copy over the filetypes they cover to a custom rule and have the same issue) are catching c files just by having extensions in their rules that have the character c in them, such as docx and acc (btw I think it was meant to put aac into this rule, not acc). You have to mess with the rule sort order to get around this bug or use the second workaround I listed. The second one is rather annoying, and I don't like the idea of relying on the rule sorting because the way it functions is not explained properly anywhere, so it would be hard to debug an issue if I had one after making a lot of custom rules.

 

Sorry to be a pain. Your advice about using the folder portals is great and if I pick up a license I'll likely solely be using folder portals. That being said, sorting certain filetypes to certain fences is, in my mind, one of the most frequent, core things you'd do in the program and I was really hoping the issue I was having was a PEBCAK one. Thank you for your time and support.