Update the metadata that appears for the currently selected item(s) in a listener

Help & Support
1

Is there a command or a way via scripting to update the metadata that appears for the currently selected item(s) in a listener. Specifically I am interesting in the metadata that appears in

  • the Columns, for example Size and Duration
  • the Status Bar, for example Size

When a program takes a while to complete creating a file this metadata will end up being incorrect / outdated. For example, if a program takes 15 seconds to write a 2 GB file then the Listener will show something smaller like 20 MB in the Size Column and in the Status Bar and when the file completes being written to and is now 2 GB the metadata will remain showing 20 MB in both places.

I know that I can right click and do View -> Refresh OR hit the F5 key but the issue is that if I cause a refresh then ALL of the files will have their metadata refreshed which can take a long time for computed Columns and Columns like Duration.

Any help would be appreciated, thank you.

2

There isn't a way to trigger that update for just one file.

But it should happen automatically once the file handle is closed by the other program. (Windows does not always send notifications about changes before then, or may report the wrong file size until the handle is closed. The duration information often also cannot be calculated while the file is only partially written, so that wouldn't really make sense in a lot of cases, and many programs lock the file to prevent other things reading while they are writing the data anyway.)

3

Hi @Leo,

Thank you for the quick response. Just like you said, the metadata does automatically update if the file is on a local drive. For my workflow though I am creating files on my network attached storage and in that case the metadata is not getting updated even several minutes after I have completely exited the program that created the file. And I believe the file handle has been closed at that point because I can rename / move / delete the file if I want to. Also, I have the Preferences -> File Operations -> Options -> Detect external file changes on network drives setting already enabled.

Is there another setting that I need to enable so that the metadata gets updated successfully for files on my network attached storage?

Thanks

4

See Changes to folders are not being detected for advice on that.

Some non-Windows network drives don't send change notifications properly, but it can also be due to other things.