Hi folks,
can u advise when flatview will work in collections ?
Thx,
Brian
I'd like to have that too for.. since flatview exists. o)
For a smaller set of folders, I help myself by creating a tmp-folder and putting ntfs-links to all folders in there (can easily be done if you add a "Create Link(s) Here" to your drag'n drop menu). On this tmp folder I activate the flatview to see "flat" on what's spread in different locations.
Flat View wouldn't really make sense in collections. They already show files and folders from various locations in a flat list.
If you want to show a Flat View of different folders from various locations, using a library will let you do that. Libraries are probably more suitable than collections here, and Flat View works in them.
FWIW, I think it makes sense. Flatview for single folders is great, having a collection of folders from various locations is great also, why not combine these?
You get a nice abstraction layer of folders from everyhwere, which feels like they're actually in one real directory.
For local indexed drives that may be true, but in case you try to add network shares/unc paths to libraries, you'll see they are of no use. A network folder needs to be accessible offline to be added to the library. In case I'd like to combine network locations with movies/images/mp3 files or a larger backup folder structures in a library, this is just nonsense to do. I don't want to have terrabytes of files copied locally (if there's enough space on a desktop/laptop at all) to make a library work, don't know who came up at microsoft with this idea.
So flatview for collections has a strong usecase I think, and I guess a lot of users apart from me expected a file collection to be switchable to flatview, just recalling some other forum threads here. Please don't feel attacked by these words, I just want to share my view and background behind my thinking. o)
You can add unindexed network folders to Libraries. I've done it. Windows complains if you do it in certain ways, but you can go around it. (It's years since I set mine up, so I have forgotten the details, but I remember it was easy enough.)
Flat View in collections does not really make sense. It might make sense with something like a collection, which only contains folders, where the folders it contains can't be inside each other... and that's called a library. 
Thank you, I'm going deepen my knowledge on libraries then and will be back soon! o))
So you were sooo right Leo! o)
I searched the internet for some advice on how to add non-indexed network locations to a library, it really can be done by editing the "library-config"-file directly. It is not very userfriendly, I guess that's intented by microsoft, but I found tools to handle this, which then turns this into a piece of cake.
Watch this:
[code]>C:\SLUtil.exe create "MyNewLibrary"
C:\SLUtil.exe addfolder MyNewLibrary" \192.168.0.1\d$
[/code]
SLUtil.exe is part of a dual toolset I downloaded here: grimadmin.com/filemgmt/index.php?id=5
It should be quite easy then to select a bunch of folders, create a temporary library and adding the selected folders to it.
After that, flat view should be available for these kind of "FileCollection"s. Must still try if this really works out that easy though. o)