Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: Re: Remaining junk in LAMS zip files

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Daniel,

This is kind of a hard one.

Let me explained why:

Say I'm using a noticeboard and I want to include an image into it. So in the HTML Editor I choose to upload a picture. Then using the image link, I can add the image I've just uploaded directly into the HTML editor.

So far no problems.

Now, say that I don't want to use this image anymore, well, I can easily just press the backspace key and delete the image in the HTML editor. That would get rid of the image on the screen however, the actual uploaded file will still remain in the sequence.

You might think that it wouldn't be too hard to check everytime I save the content of an activity whether the uploaded files are still being using in the activity or not by parsing the HTML code produced by the editor... that shouldn't be too hard.

However, the catch here is with files like .swf and .flvs. Some of the embedding objects (like flash) can have internal links to files (in binary format) that can't be parsed in HTML and detect whether these files are used or not.

Therefore deleting them if we can't find a reference to these files might break the content completely.

So back in version 2.1, we added an option so you can manually delete the files if you don't need them by pressing this garbage bin button:

I know, I know... this is not probably the perfect solution. But until we come up with a smarter way to remove unneeded files this option can work.

If you want, you can eliminate these files manually and you'll see that the size of your sequence will be reduced dramatically.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione