FTP Uploads
ArcWeb 1.62 and later has support for uploading files using the FTP protocol. This may be of particular interest to users of Demon Internet users when combined with the interactive editing facility (once
I've re-enabled the automatic upload)
Using the Upload Facility
To use the upload facility, you must have the FTP fetcher open switched on in the Network preferences and you MUST disable the FTP proxy by ensuring that the option is not selected. Navigate your way to the directory, so that a directory listing is shown on the page
- Enter the URL in the writable URL icon at the top of an open web page
- Enter it in the Open URL dialogue box
Since I expect the commonest usage at first to be people uploading files to the Demon Internet's HomePages service, I shall base my example around a host called customer.
- Open the URL: ftp://customer@homepages.demon.co.uk/ and when prompted, supply your Demon login password to complete the FTP login. You should now be looking at a directory listing of all your files or maybe just nothing except the text ArcWeb FTP Listing or maybe a greeting message from Demon's FTP server.
- Find the file you wish to upload to that directory in a Filer window, and drop it into the directory display window. You can drop it anywhere in the larger main part of the window. You cannot drop it anywhere on the toolbar.
- A dialogue box will now have appeared prompting you for a name for the file on the remote system. ArcWeb will attempt to make an intelligent guess at the remote name based upon the filetype and anything following a / character in the file's leaf name, by assuming suffixes such as .gif & .html and a few others. You can edit the leaf name of the file, and then click on the Upload button.
- At this point, an attempt will be made to transfer your file to the cache and upload it to the server. If this succeeds you will receive a message indicating the fact. You may have to re-enter your password if the connection to the FTP server was dropped between the time you retrieved the directory listing an attempted the upload, too.
- If you want to see an updated directory listing, you need to manually request a reload of the directory. This will be automated in the future.
Known Problems
You cannot currently perform retrieve-edit-replace updates on HTML pages in the directory display. This facility is still under test, but seems to work quite nicely as far as I can tell, and will be enabled in a future version.