For those times when you just can't get enough of file batching

[Benjam901]

Hello all,

I posted a while ago about a UI script that could help with file processing, however it fell short as you would have to contain your processing functionality (which could get quite massive) inside the script or reference in your module.

It is essentially Windows based but I am curious to see how it holds up against OSX.

So...I revised the class and have come up with File Runner:

- File Runner is a handy Qt UI class that helps with constant batch processing on files or directories with a twist!

- You can apply any external script you have written to process the files

How to use:

- Simply drag in the directories you want to iterate over into the directories window

- Type in your desired file format

- Drag in the script you want to process your files into the script window

- Type in the name of the function you want to run

- Choose whether or not you want the program to recursively process all sub directories

- Select your desired directories and your desired script

- Click Run. It's as easy as that!

Feel free to edit the class however you see fit

I have been playing around with it doing some simple stuff but it seems to be in working order :)

Enjoy!

[Marcus Ottosson]

Hi Ben,

May I suggest you consider sharing code in a browsable format, such as in a Gist? It is much preferable, personally, than downloading a file and opening it elsewhere. Something I very rarely do unless I've assured myself that it's worth it.

Also a screenshot goes a long way with anything graphical.

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[Ben Hearn]

Hey Marcus,

Yeah of course it is a few hundred lines was all but if that's generally not considered a problem then for sure. 2 mins and I will post up a screen grab and the gist code :)

-- Ben

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[Benjam901]

Screen grab:

gist readable format:

https://gist.github.com/ben-hearn-sb/dfd79ba2a7a77907cc77

-- Ben

[Marcus Ottosson]

Not a problem at all, I think it looks great!

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[Justin Israel]

Hey Ben,

Thanks for sharing your work! 

I took a look at the script and gave it a quick test. Got some feedback, if you were interested...

First problem for me was what you already expected. There are windows-specific concepts in the script, so it failed right away for me on OSX (and would fail on linux too). @line 34 you make an assumption that users will have "APPDATA" set in their environment, in order to join a directory path. I don't have that env key, so I immediately crashed with trying to join on a None type. I could quickly get past that by chucking in a default empty string value as the second parameter to getenv(). However, this results in every run of the tool creating a CUSTOM_DIR in my current working directory :-) A way to solve your intention is to take a look at using QSettings. This is a platform-independent way to save user preferences for your app. It will just go into the correct place for the correct platform.

On line 40, that "global dirIn" isn't needed. It's not doing anything here.

L107: Generally its not good practice to show UI windows from within a class constructor. It forces the caller to get a window that shows itself right away. Obviously it doesn't matter in the case where your script is only meant to execute, but if you ever wanted to offer your script as an importable module for someone to be able to integrate, and show this tool, it would make it less flexible. Similarly, at the end of the script, you directly call run(). If you put that under an "if __name__ == '__main__'" guard, then it would allow the script to be imported without running it. 

L126: This is where I didn't get past, when I did a quick test of the tool. Here you are doing a check if the path starts with a "/", and stripping it off the path. So my absolute paths that were dropped were now being checked as relative paths to the current working directory, and were not found to exist. Is that the intent? Is there a very specific use case you expect people to do when running the tool and choosing with directories they are allowed to drop? Also, there is a small bug here in the logic (and similarly in scriptDropEvent), where if every path that is checked from the mime data does pass the check and the loop does a "continue", you end up getting to the "event.accept()" line anyways instead of "event.ignore()"

L382:  I didn't really get to test this to confirm, but it seems like there is a bug here in how the loop breaks when it doesn't want to do a recursive operation on files. If the first directory you look at is empty, the walk will still continue to a subdirectory, which might have files, and in which case you then process once and then break to stop recursion. So you will get whatever subdirectory first has files, in the walk recursion. Seems like what you really want is to break no matter what, even if there are no files, to keep the walk from recursing into subdirs?

While its great that you have nice module documentation at the top of the file, one thing it is missing is documenting the signature of the function you expect to find, when importing a users python script. I looked through the code and saw that you expect it to be  "myFunction(filePath)" , but it would be good to add that to the documentation. Also, if you really want to make your application extensible, you could even support more than just a python script that has a specific function, by allowing any type of executable file that just expects 1 or more file paths to be passed as arguments. Someone could write a bash script, a bat file, python, ..., and you would run it in a subprocess. This would be slower to do on a per-file basis, so it would be something you might want to pass in batches of arguments. Anyways, just a thought and not something really needed.

Hope this wasn't more feedback then you were looking for!

Justin

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[Ben Hearn]

Hey Justin,

Thanks for the feedback. I was hoping for some epic feedback so it's all good :) The more the better!

The checking of the '/' was a windows thing I think, every time I would drop a directory in the directory path would start with a '/' so I decided to strip it. I was unsure as to whether this was a true issue. If this is not the case I will run some more tests and remove it if necessary.

I will defo look into Qsettings. I know Qt has a whole bunch of handy modules like this but I have not explored them as of yet.

As per showing the window in the class constructor would you recommend more along the lines of:

if __name__ == "main":

    sys.app etc. etc.

    window = class()

    window.show()

Good catch on the event.accept() bug I will patch that up asap.

Same thing with the recursive catch. Completely overlooked that I will patch that up asap also.

I will document the use case for users functions, that is an excellent point to consider.

Extending the program to handle bash and batch scripts is a cool extension as well I will definitely look into this.

-- Ben

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[Justin Israel]

On Sun, 22 Nov 2015 8:51 AM Ben Hearn <benandr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey Justin,

Thanks for the feedback. I was hoping for some epic feedback so it's all good :) The more the better!

The checking of the '/' was a windows thing I think, every time I would drop a directory in the directory path would start with a '/' so I decided to strip it. I was unsure as to whether this was a true issue. If this is not the case I will run some more tests and remove it if necessary.

I will defo look into Qsettings. I know Qt has a whole bunch of handy modules like this but I have not explored them as of yet.

As per showing the window in the class constructor would you recommend more along the lines of:

if __name__ == "main":

    sys.app etc. etc.

    window = class()

    window.show()

Ya this would be a better approach. Where the script decides to create and show the UI when it is run as a main executable, but leaves it free to be imported by others.

Good catch on the event.accept() bug I will patch that up asap.

Same thing with the recursive catch. Completely overlooked that I will patch that up asap also.

I will document the use case for users functions, that is an excellent point to consider.

Extending the program to handle bash and batch scripts is a cool extension as well I will definitely look into this.

-- Ben

On 21 November 2015 at 20:33, Justin Israel <justin...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey Ben,

Thanks for sharing your work! 

I took a look at the script and gave it a quick test. Got some feedback, if you were interested...

First problem for me was what you already expected. There are windows-specific concepts in the script, so it failed right away for me on OSX (and would fail on linux too). @line 34 you make an assumption that users will have "APPDATA" set in their environment, in order to join a directory path. I don't have that env key, so I immediately crashed with trying to join on a None type. I could quickly get past that by chucking in a default empty string value as the second parameter to getenv(). However, this results in every run of the tool creating a CUSTOM_DIR in my current working directory :-) A way to solve your intention is to take a look at using QSettings. This is a platform-independent way to save user preferences for your app. It will just go into the correct place for the correct platform.

On line 40, that "global dirIn" isn't needed. It's not doing anything here.

L107: Generally its not good practice to show UI windows from within a class constructor. It forces the caller to get a window that shows itself right away. Obviously it doesn't matter in the case where your script is only meant to execute, but if you ever wanted to offer your script as an importable module for someone to be able to integrate, and show this tool, it would make it less flexible. Similarly, at the end of the script, you directly call run(). If you put that under an "if __name__ == '__main__'" guard, then it would allow the script to be imported without running it. 

L126: This is where I didn't get past, when I did a quick test of the tool. Here you are doing a check if the path starts with a "/", and stripping it off the path. So my absolute paths that were dropped were now being checked as relative paths to the current working directory, and were not found to exist. Is that the intent? Is there a very specific use case you expect people to do when running the tool and choosing with directories they are allowed to drop? Also, there is a small bug here in the logic (and similarly in scriptDropEvent), where if every path that is checked from the mime data does pass the check and the loop does a "continue", you end up getting to the "event.accept()" line anyways instead of "event.ignore()"

L382:  I didn't really get to test this to confirm, but it seems like there is a bug here in how the loop breaks when it doesn't want to do a recursive operation on files. If the first directory you look at is empty, the walk will still continue to a subdirectory, which might have files, and in which case you then process once and then break to stop recursion. So you will get whatever subdirectory first has files, in the walk recursion. Seems like what you really want is to break no matter what, even if there are no files, to keep the walk from recursing into subdirs?

While its great that you have nice module documentation at the top of the file, one thing it is missing is documenting the signature of the function you expect to find, when importing a users python script. I looked through the code and saw that you expect it to be  "myFunction(filePath)" , but it would be good to add that to the documentation. Also, if you really want to make your application extensible, you could even support more than just a python script that has a specific function, by allowing any type of executable file that just expects 1 or more file paths to be passed as arguments. Someone could write a bash script, a bat file, python, ..., and you would run it in a subprocess. This would be slower to do on a per-file basis, so it would be something you might want to pass in batches of arguments. Anyways, just a thought and not something really needed.

Hope this wasn't more feedback then you were looking for!

Justin

On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 7:05 AM Marcus Ottosson <konstr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Not a problem at all, I think it looks great!

On 21 November 2015 at 17:52, Benjam901 <benandr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Screen grab:

<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-mYnbl7jHIQE/VlCuvlw7e_I/AAAAAAAACvk/lmcQ6M9JxPw/s1600/file_runner.jpg">

gist readable format:

https://gist.github.com/ben-hearn-sb/dfd79ba2a7a77907cc77

-- Ben

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[Ben Hearn]

Hey Justin,

I am working with the suggested changes and for the appdata dir path I have this which works for me on Windows: 

qAppData = str(QtGui.QDesktopServices.storageLocation(QtGui.QDesktopServices.DataLocation))

Could you confirm this gives the correct OSX path for your local settings dir?

-- Ben

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[Marcus Ottosson]

Some minor feedback from me.

1. Use spaces, not tabs.
2. Use snake_case, not mixedCase
3. More files, lose the # ------------- #

On the basis that one standard is better than many standards. Personally, it means I’ll more efficiently grok the contents of other peoples code without the distraction of personal style.

In this case, I’m having trouble commenting on function and use because I can’t see past style.

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[Justin Israel]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 2:06 AM Ben Hearn <benandr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey Justin,

I am working with the suggested changes and for the appdata dir path I have this which works for me on Windows: 

qAppData = str(QtGui.QDesktopServices.storageLocation(QtGui.QDesktopServices.DataLocation))

Could you confirm this gives the correct OSX path for your local settings dir?

Well that works for finding the location for which you can store arbitrary data. But it isn't the settings location that you would get via QSettings. It is just the difference between whether you are storing actual settings, or data (resources, images, large text, binaries, ...)

In your case, I think either one could work. QSettings can store arrays of strings. But if you are going to continue writing out your own custom data file, maybe you should look at using cPickle? That would be a bit better than writing out representations of lists and then reading and eval'ing them back in again.

 

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[Ben Hearn]

Hey guys,

Thanks for the feedback. I finished up yesterday afternoon with a revised version:

https://gist.github.com/ben-hearn-sb/bd25face0beb0f00397f

As per spaces vs tabs, is spaces a python preferred method of indenting?

And snake_case. Is this a Python convention for variable names also?

The camelCase convention I picked up from my days of programming C and the likes, I guess the convention just stuck. For variable names anyway, using snake_case for function names seems like a good thing to get into especially since it separates variables and functions.

Hmm cPickle eh? I might have to take a stab at that I have seen a few examples floating around the net. Seems I need to up my cPickle game.

Let me know your thoughts on the revised version :)

-- Ben

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[Marcus Ottosson]

As per spaces vs tabs, is spaces a python preferred method of indenting?
And snake_case. Is this a Python convention for variable names also?

Maybe you weren’t familiar with PEP8, in which case my next critique would be to get familiar with it. :)

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[Ben Hearn]

Aha, am taking a browse now. I used PEP8 to distinguish between class names and module names but I haven't dug into it with any detail. Seems to be my next port of call :)

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