Is there a way to tell DOpus to select (highlight) those items in a collection that do not point to files anymore. (This would occur, for example, if I had deleted the file, or renamed it, or the indicated path no longer exists as specified.) I would ultimately like to remove those items from the collection (in most cases), but would prefer those orphan items first be indicated to me. In other words, I'm not looking for DOpus to automatically remove orphans from the collection, but just select them, so I could first see what they are. Thanks.
Here's one way to do a bit of checking, get the collection to show thumbnails. If a file has been moved, then it will show the generic icon rather than a thumbnail. Probably not infallible, but a guide.
That works here for PDF files.
Related question, perhaps, can I tweak something to get DOpus to show the location of an item in a collection?
Status bar or Info Tip would be nice. Scrub that, Info Tip can do it.
I figured out a roundabout way to clear invalid entries from a collection, depicted in the below screen snags. And although somewhat indirect, the process is not as hard as a series of 8 screen shots would seem to suggest, and once you do it a couple of times it goes pretty quickly.
However, if anyone can come up with a simpler method, please post it. (I had also been thinking of trying another method, something along the lines of an export of the file list to a text file, followed by an import into a different collection, with appropriate command-line switches if they actually exist, but I didn't follow up on that method once I thought of the method shown here.)
Also, any caveats regarding situations where this method might fail are welcome. (I do wonder what would happen if a file's read-only or system ... )
And if the kind DOpus folks want to include a simple native way to accomplish this action in a later version, I'd not be averse to it.
Below is what I came up with. (Be sure to scroll the image down to view all 8 steps.)
If the sort-arrow is red (which means the data is still being populated), wait for it to turn black (which means it's finished).
All of the missing files will have an empty Owner field.
Note that there may be other reasons for the Owner field being empty. For example, files stored on filesystems (e.g. FAT) which don't store the Owner, or files where you don't have permission to view the owner information. So you might still want to double-check the indicated files, but it should give you a big shortcut by allowing you to ignore the vast majority.
By the way, if Opus is running when a file in a collection is deleted then it should automatically remove that file from the collection (after some delay, in case the file re-appears and was only deleted so it could be replaced by a new version; the delay is 5 seconds by default, but can be changed via Prefs/Misc/Advanced).
Making it fully automated probably wouldn't be too difficult. dopusrt.exe can be used to update collections from outside of Opus, and can also import/export collections to/from other list formats (docs here), so it'd probably only take a bit of VBScript (etc.) to do.
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