Summary: It's easy to get your folders' "Tree View" to show all objects. Dirk shows you how, using a Rexx script by Marco Steinbach

Marco Steinbach sent me a cool little Rexx script this month and I thought I would share it with you. As you know, the WPS Folder has three views for displaying its contents: Icon view where objects are displayed as independent icons, Details view where objects are displayed in rows with information like size, creation date and so on, and Tree view where objects are displayed as a connected tree with folders leading to deeper branches.

The Tree view is similar to the view displayed by the File Manager of Windows 3.1 and Windows Explorer in Win 95/98/NT. However, by default the Tree view in a WPS folder shows only Folder objects. To see the Program objects in a folder, you would have to open the Folder object in Icon or Details view. The ability to display other objects is built into the Tree view, however, and Marco's script shows how to enable it.

The key to this script is the SysCreateObject function in the RexxUtil library. The calling form of this function is as follows:

result=SysCreateObject(classname, title, location <,setup>, <,duplicateflag>)

classname:

The name of the class of which this object is a member.

title:

The object title as displayed under the icon

location:

The object location. This can be specified as either an object ID (for example, ) or a file system path (for example, C:\OS2).

setup:

A WinCreateObject setup string. More on this below.

duplicateflag:

This parameter indicates what action should be taken when the Setup string specifies an object ID, and an object with that object ID already exists. (In our case, we will be updating the object since the file system folders already exist.) "U" means update the object, "R" replace the object, and "F" fail if the object exists.

result:

The return code. It equals 1 (TRUE) if the creation of the object succeeded and 0 (FALSE) if it failed.

For a given folder, Marco calls SysCreateObject like so:

rc = SysCreateObject("WPFolder",FolderName,FolderLocation,
   "ALWAYSSORT=YES;ICONVIEW=NONFLOWED, MINI;MENUBAR=NO;SHOWALLINTREEVIEW=YES",
   "u")

The key element in the setup string is the SHOWALLINTREEVIEW=YES entry. That is the setting that forces the display of all objects in Tree view.

For this setting to be most useful, you need to set the SHOWALLINTREEVIEW setting for all of the subfolders of the current folder as well. Otherwise when you expanded a subfolder it would only show its folder objects. So, we need to get a list of of the folders underneath the given one. Another RexxUtil function makes that pretty easy: SysFileTree. We used this function previously in our recursive delete script. In that script we needed a list of files to be returned. Here we need a list of directories but that requires only a small change in the function call:

rc = SysFileTree(Folder'\*', 'Files','DSO')

SysFileTree(Mask, Results, Attributes)

DO I = 1 TO Files.0
   Folder         = Files.I
   FolderLocation = Folder
   FolderLocation = LEFT(FolderLocation, LASTPOS("\", FolderLocation)-1)
   IF LENGTH(FolderLocation)=2 THEN FolderLocation = FolderLocation'\'
   FolderName     = SUBSTR(Folder, LASTPOS("\", Folder)+1)
   Call DispStat
   rc = SysCreateObject("WPFolder", FolderName,  FolderLocation,
      "ALWAYSSORT=YES;ICONVIEW=NONFLOWED,MINI;MENUBAR=NO;SHOWALLINTREEVIEW=YES", "u")
   IF  rc \=1 THEN SAY 'Folder could not be updated ...'
END