Folder weight tool in ASP.NET | Samir Patel - Software Developer, San Antonio, TX - 78209

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Folder weight tool in ASP.NET

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ASP.NET Visual Basic application - Disk weight directory report

Index all the files on your hard drive(s) and store them in a SQL server 2005 database

This application lists all your local drives and allows you to scan all your files. As the files are scanned their paths, names and sizes are stored in a database for future retrieval and statistical analysis. The analysis portion of the program will let you see how much space a certain folder takes up on your drive. In addition to being able to search your entire file system, you can also view a graph, that is dynamically generated from the data that was previously acquired from your file system. Sounds like fun! Lets get started...

The first undertaking is to procure the necessary software. Since this program will run in a browser, we will be using visual web developer express. The database software is SQL server express with Management studio express that will help us visually design and debug the data that we will be storing. Both these programs are free. If you own Visual studio you can use that in place of the express versions as it is more feature rich. The free versions provided by Microsoft are ample to create and debug this application.

Create a database called FileSystemDB. Now create a table called fileSystemTable. This table will hold references to all the files on all our drives within the file system. Note that you can also create separate tables for each drive in question depending on the size of your drives. The advantage to having just one table is that it is easy to manage as all the data is located centrally. The disadvantage is speed, especially if you have millions of files.

Here is the SQL code you can use to create the fields.

USE [FileSystemDB]
GO
/****** Object: Table [dbo].[fileSystemTable] Script Date: 04/02/2008 15:50:18 ******/
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO
SET ANSI_PADDING ON
GO
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[fileSystemTable](
[fileID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
[filename] [varchar](max) NULL,
[fileSize] [decimal](18, 0) NULL,
[filePath] [varchar](max) NULL,
[extension] [char](10) NULL,
[lastAccessed] [varchar](50) NULL,
[creationTime] [varchar](50) NULL,
CONSTRAINT [PK_fileSystemTable] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (
[fileID] ASC
)WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON) ON [PRIMARY]
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO
SET ANSI_PADDING OFF

Now in Visual Web Developer create a new Dataset, with the default name Dataset1.xsd
Dataset that maps to the fileSystemTable Create a new dataset based on the file system table

Create a new dataset based on the file system table

You can start designing the interface for the Default.aspx page. Here is what I came up with. Main interface for the application. Runs completely in a web browser.

Main interface for the application. Runs completely in a web browser.

Interface for the application drive mapping tool

Imports System.IO.Directory
Imports System.IO.FileInfo
Imports DataSet1
Imports DataSet1TableAdapters
Imports System.IO
Imports System

We are importing two classes from System.IO Directory and FileInfo. These classes will enable us to traverse a directory recursively and determine its contents. As you might have gathered from the Dataset, we will also be storing pertinant information about the files.

Private Sub loadLogicalDrives()
        Me.DropDownList1.Items.Clear()
        Dim logicalDrives As String()
        logicalDrives = Environment.GetLogicalDrives()

        For Each drive As String In logicalDrives
            Me.DropDownList1.Items.Add(drive)
        Next
 End Sub

This subroutine gets all the physical hard drives that you have in your system including the drive names.

 Private Function processDirectory(ByVal drive As String) As String
        Me.resultLabel.Text = "Processing directories in drive " & Me.DropDownList1.SelectedItem.ToString() & vbCrLf
        Dim taskResult As String
        taskResult = "Task failed"

        Dim fileTableAdapter As New DataSet1TableAdapters.fileSystemTableTableAdapter()
        Try
            If Me.clearTableCheckBox.Checked = True Then
                fileTableAdapter.clearTableData()
                findDirectory(drive)
                taskResult = "Task Executed Successfully!"
            End If
            If Me.clearTableCheckBox.Checked = False Then
                findDirectory(drive)
                taskResult = "Task Executed Successfully!"
            End If
        Catch ex As Exception
            Message(ex.ToString())
            taskResult = "Task did not execute problem in processDirectory()"
        End Try
        Return taskResult
 End Function

This function accepts the currently selected drive. A table adapter is used to clear all the data in the table if the clear all data checkbox on the Default.aspx page is checked.

The subroutine findDirectory(drive) does all the real work along with the subroutine readFilesInDirectory(ByVal .directoryName as String)

Private Sub findDirectory(ByVal drive As String)
        Dim getInfo As System.IO.DirectoryInfo
        Dim directoryInfo As New StringBuilder
        Try
            For Each foundDirectory As String In My.Computer.FileSystem.GetDirectories(drive, FileIO.SearchOption.SearchAllSubDirectories)
                getInfo = My.Computer.FileSystem.GetDirectoryInfo(foundDirectory)
                directoryInfo.AppendLine(getInfo.ToString())

                If (foundDirectory = "System Volume Information") Then
                    Continue For
                Else
                    readFilesIndirectory(foundDirectory)
                End If
            Next
        Catch ex As Exception
            Message(ex.ToString())
        End Try
    End Sub

One thing to note is that we are not interested in "System Volume Information" directories. Basically we are traversing all the directories. For each directory we call the readFilesIndirectory subroutine By passing it the foundDirectory

    Private Sub readFilesIndirectory(ByVal directoryName As String)
        Dim lastAccessed, creationTime, filename, fileSize, fileFolder, fileExtension As String
        Dim fileSystemTableAdapter As New DataSet1TableAdapters.fileSystemTableTableAdapter()

        For Each foundFile As String In My.Computer.FileSystem.GetFiles(directoryName)
            With My.Computer.FileSystem.GetFileInfo(foundFile)
                lastAccessed = .LastAccessTime
                creationTime = .CreationTime
                filename = .Name
                fileSize = .Length / 1024
                fileFolder = .DirectoryName & "\"
                fileExtension = .Extension
            End With
            fileSystemTableAdapter.InsertQuery(filename, fileSize, fileFolder, fileExtension, lastAccessed, creationTime)
        Next
    End Sub

This function also contains a reference to the Dataset that we created. The fileSystemTableAdapter is used to insert the file and directory information into the database. We will later use this information to make file searching extremely efficient and responsive.

    Public Sub Message(ByVal Message As String)
        System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response.Write("<script language="" javascript="">" & vbCrLf)
        System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response.Write("alert(""" & Message & """)" & vbCrLf)
        System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response.Write("</script>")
    End Sub

ASP.NET does not have a native msgbox method. This function is a simple javaScript hack to create a message box. It takes a string as an argument and shows a messagebox with an ok button.

Protected Sub viewGraphButton_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles viewGraphButton.Click
        Dim xmlData As New StringBuilder
        xmlData.AppendLine("<chart palette="4" decimals="0" enablesmartlabels="1" enablerotation="0" bgcolor="99CCFF,FFFFFF" bgalpha="40,100" bgratio="0,100" bgangle="360" showborder="1" startingangle="70">")
        Dim filePath As String
        Dim folderWeight As Decimal
        Dim fileTableAdapter As New DataSet1TableAdapters.fileSystemTableTableAdapter()
        Dim fileTable As New DataSet1.fileSystemTableDataTable

        fileTable = fileTableAdapter.GetDataBy2()

        For Each fileTableRow As DataSet1.fileSystemTableRow In fileTable
            filePath = fileTableRow.filePath
            folderWeight = fileTableRow.FolderWeight
            xmlData.AppendLine("<set label="" filepath.tostring()="" value="" folderweight="" &="">")
        Next
        xmlData.AppendLine("</set>")

        Dim objStreamWriter As StreamWriter
        objStreamWriter = New StreamWriter(Server.MapPath("Data.xml"))
        objStreamWriter.Write(xmlData.ToString())

    End Sub

This is the click event for the View Graph button. I am using a properietary flash file to display the graph. Since the code is copyrighted, I unfortunately cannot discuss it. The basic concept is to generate an XML file that is populated at runtime based on the values that you pass to it.
So if you wanted to filter down a particular directory, and see how much space each one of the subdirectories was taking up, you could view the same graphically. It is a really nice way of figuring out what is taking up way too much room on your drives.

The other parts of the program are quite intuitive. I have made an interface to search all the files. To do that I created a text box with a submit button. On the click event of the submit button, a bound gridview control is populated with the results from a simple SQL query.

SELECT * FROM fileSystemTable where fileName like '%fileName'

You can also make the query even more complicating taking the drive information into account eg. c:\windows\......

You can also use SQL to aggregate the fileSize field and group by directory to see how much each directory "weighs"
This information can then be used to populate an XML file based on some graphing interface to visualize your data weight.

Comments

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wallace530

|Registered |2009-05-19 02:10:17

great post sir..
thanks for sharing. really helped a
lot here.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 30 May 2008 )

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