Disable Viewer Paner for locations

Hi,

is it somehow possible to disable the Viewer Pane for specific locations.
My layout has the Viewer Pane and the Metadata panel enabled, which is fine for almost all locations.

But a specific location, namely a mapped network drive is causing trouble when a file gets selected. The drive mainly contains video files. As the connection is not very fast I takes a lot of time for the viewer pane to load the file and display it. Often it blocks also any operation I want to do, e.g. move, delete and I annoyingly get asked to retry the operation three, four times. Sometimes it even makes DOpus unresponsive so I have to kill DOpus or even restart my computer.

So I want to exclude this location from loading any files in the viewer pane.

Regards
xbprm

You could have a script which turns the viewer on and off each time you change folders, based on the paths. (OnAfterFolderChange)

I tend to leave the viewer off when not using it and turn it on when I need it. That way it doesn't use up space either.

Hi Leo,

thanks. Tried it but didn't wroks so far. Any hint why?

     ' Set the script type to VBScript to use this script
    ' The OnInit event is called by Directory Opus to initialize the script
    Function OnInit(ByRef initData) 

    ' Provide basic information about the script
        initData.name = "ViewPaneOffOnRShare"
        initData.desc = "Disables View Pane on R-Share"
        initData.copyright = "(c) 2016 "
        initData.default_enable = True 

    End Function 


    ' The OnAfterFolderChange event is called after a folder has been read
    Function OnAfterFolderChange(ByRef afterFolderChangeData) 

    ' The result property of the AfterFolderChangeData object tells us if the read was successful
        If afterFolderChangeData.result Then 

    ' Check if the path that was read begins with lib://Pictures
            If Left(afterFolderChangeData.tab.path, 9) = "R:\Videos" Then

                ' The path matched, so call our CheckPictureSorting subroutine to update the sort mode if needed
                ' We pass the Tab that the folder was read in as a parameter to the subroutine
                'Call CheckPictureSorting(afterFolderChangeData.tab)
				Set objCmd = DOpus.CreateCommand
				objCmd.RunCommand("Set VIEWPANE=off")

			Else
				Set objCmd = DOpus.CreateCommand
				objCmd.RunCommand("Set VIEWPANE=on")
			
            End If

        End If 

    End Function

Sorry, scripts works. Forgot to place in the correct script folder :-/

@xbprm
What's your experience with this script? I used something similar for some short amount of time, which would remember the viewer pane visibility for tabs. When switching tabs, the viewer pane would show and hide automatically and it drove me nuts! o)

I also suffered from files being presented in the viewer pane upon selection. The latter is wanted most of the time of course, but for specific file types, some viewers take long to load and browsing files can get annoying if you encounter a lot of these "slow loading preview" files. This is especially for office documents, which you cannot doubleclick and open until the viewer pane is done previewing them.

So what about a little checkbox right in the top of the viewer panes caption bar, where you can disable the viewer temporarily (not hide it!). You can argue that closing the viewer would do the same, but closing/opening the viewer pane causes a weird lister layout with stretched file displays/columns and toolbars elongating. It has the same nervous effect as toggling it automatically. Manually toggling the viewer back and forth is something which is weird to work with.
A simple "enabled" checkbox in the top would solve this quite elegantly.

What' you think? o)

Hi tbone,

my experiences with scripts is not totally satisfying. I am using two scripts: One is using OnAfterFolderChange, the other OnActivateTab. But these are not always working. I suspect that is because of my default lister which has the path/tab in question already open. Therefore the triggers are not working as I am already in the path/tab. At least when I first open the lister after reboot. If I close the lister and then open a new one the Viewer Pane gets disabled

@leo: Can you confirm that observation?

Back to the question with a little checkbox: I would love that for two reasons:

  1. Not visual hassle by showing/hiding the viewer pane
  2. My layout could have the Viewer Pane disabled by default and activate it on demand. Therefore accidental loading on slow drives could be prevented (see above) more easily.

The script may also need to handle OnOpenLister and/or OnOpenTab events.