dropbox filename & path do's and dont's

Are there any characters that shouldn’t be used in the dropbox folder inside codea? I am experiencing consistent crashing every time I try to sync the dropbox folder inside Codea, and I think it’s because I have images in there with "@"s in the filename. I downloaded an asset pack that is designed for a retina device. Also, what are the rules for nested folders?

I haven’t experimented with folders inside Dropbox/Apps/Codea/ but if it’s the same as what happens when you put an unsupported file type in the Dropbox, the file will sync, but you won’t be able to see it in the asset picker or access it with readText or the other asset commands, but you should be able to access the contents with the Lua file, OS, and io command sets, but only in Codea runtime, not in Xcode. If you’re targeting Xcode/ the App Store, stick with Codea’s asset and data commands, rather than the Lua file/io/OS command sets.

No idea about @ signs in file names. The good thing about using Dropbox is that you can manipulate the files on your computer, so things like batch rename aren’t too hard.

Normally having @'s in the filename is used to indicate retina versions of your images (@2x, @4x etc) so Codea might be getting it’s knickers in a twist over that - as @Yojimbo2000 suggested, I’d just try doing a rename on the elements in your dropbox folder on your Mac / PC - The Mac namechanger app (https://mrrsoftware.com/namechanger/) works brilliantly for this.

Yeah, i’m still messing with it. It seems that codea just does not like Folders.

it is true that you can’t have any subfolders inside of dropbox. copy files always to the root level of: ./Dropbox/

So how are we supposed to organize multiple projects’ assets?

One way without sub folders is to add prefix names to group them.

right.

According to this post, Folders are allowed, but the preview window thing doesn’t display them:

https://codea.io/talk/discussion/6290/feature-request-folders-in-dropbox-assets

@brookesi commented his findings at the end of the post.

Sub folders do work. You can create a sub folder in Dropbox and sync it with Codea. I created a sub folder in Dropbox, synced it with Codea and read the file. The problem is, in Codea you don’t see the sub folders. You would have to view them in the Dropbox app to keep track of what’s where in Codea.

you think that’ll ever be fixed in an update? @Simeon

@matkatmusic check out my findings on moving items from Dropbox into project asset packs at https://codea.io/talk/discussion/7471/creating-codea-asset-packs#latest

@TechDojo re name-changing on a Mac, if you’re on El Capitan, there’s a very useful built-in name changer in Finder now, just select multiple items, right-click “rename items”. Not quite as full featured as a dedicated renamer like BetterFinderRename etc, but for simple stuff it’s pretty good.

I think it’d be nice if Codea had a fairly full file system, where we pretty much have freedom to put things in whatever folder we like, either via the GUI or programmatically, in our own code. Pythonista does this very well I think. The fact that it’s so easy to share code with Pythonista IMO really helps it to flourish as a platform. Sharing code in Codea is still a bit of a bind. This is largely Apple’s fault. But if we could programatically create folders, and create projects inside of those folders, that would be huge. Then you could have proper installers.

@yojimbo2000 I agree completely - didn’t realise about the new feature in El Capitan (but NameChanger is free anyway :slight_smile: )