Xerox Paris, a document system Support & Software User Guide

Changing File Attributes

The file attributes are changed to hidden, or the file name is changed

 or the

 to prevent the Spooler constantly going back in a

loop and re-processing the same input file.

The side effect of changing the attributes to hidden is that the files appear to
have been immediately deleted from the system. In fact they are still there, they
are simply waiting to be processed by PARIS. Only after processing are the
files deleted.

An example of the Spooler polling directories for
input data

Once a job definition has been created with a directory search path, (for
example, E:\INV\DTA\T*.DTA), the Spooler immediately checks the
contents of this directory to find any files that match the search criteria.

Each time a file is found that matches the criteria, the Spooler creates an SJR,
then it changes the attributes of the file to ‘hidden’.

In this example, the Spooler would search the E:\INV\DTA directory and
immediately generate Spooler Job Requests for all files matching the search
mask, in this case T*.DTA (that is, all filenames starting with ‘T’ and with
the extension .DTA). The attributes for all these matching files would also
immediately be changed to ‘Hidden’, which means the files have in theory
disappeared from the directory.

If there were 20 files in the directory matching the T* and .DTA mask, the
Spooler display would immediately show 20 jobs queued ready for
processing.