On Oct 11, 2012, at 10:32 AM, "Hellum, Timothy" <
email@hidden> wrote:
I am seeing some flakey behaviour with a Folder Action I am running on an Xserve (10.7.5).
Workflow:
1) Pause (10 seconds, to hopefully reach EOF for dropped files)
With a folder action, you don't need to get the folder's contents, unless folders are being added to the watched folder and you want to process their contents. Otherwise, newly detected items are automatically passed to the folder action workflow as input. So, you can probably remove this action from your workflow.
3) Image Processor
OUTPUT files to folder on SMB share adjacent to INPUT folder
JPEG out
Adobe (1998) colourspace
Fit within 800x800
Watermark (server-local PNG)
The primary issue is that when multiple files are dropped on the (SMB-mounted) watch folder from a user machine, some, but not all files will process - and its random. The same group dropped a second time may process just the same few, or a different few - never the lot. The test files are all smallish JPEGs - 1-2 megs in the Finder. The quantity of dropped files is 3-8. Files dropped one-at-a-time generally work fine - but not always! Some of the singly-dropped files sit in the watch folder without processing (but if dropped a second time, they might process!).
Folder Actions sometimes have a knack for picking up files before they're done writing, and ignoring certain files. I would try removing the Get Folder Contents action, to see if that helps. Another option might be to create a scheduled workflow, which retrieves files from the folder in intervals, rather than triggering automatically when items are added to the folder. I would also configure your workflow to immediately move the files out of the watched folder to a temporary folder while processing, to ensure they aren't picked up a second time for some reason.
Secondly, I am unable to get the Move Finder Items to Trash to work (to clear the watch folder), although I suspect that this is because the watch folder is on a mounted share and not local.
I'm not sure about this. It could be that the Image Processor's output doesn't match the input required by the Move Finder Items to Trash action. I'd try stepping through the workflow in Automator, and monitoring the results of each action to ensure they match what's expected.
Hope this helps.