Today, I did some work on the files section of Project Trackr. There is nothing fancy at the moment, just the ability to upload a file, view a list of all files, view details of a single file (just a dump of the relevant database row) and the ability to download a file. At the minute, all this functionality is still in it’s infancy, but one thing I’ve added is the ability to download all your files in a single zip archive. This works, but it’s not really intuitive in it’s current form.
It suffers from the following problems
It includes all your files, this means it can be a pretty big zip file to download
There is no way to select which files to include and which to exclude
There is no hierarchy within the zip – Everything is in the top level
So we need to be able to select which files we want to include, so the obvious suggestion would be be list all the files and have a set of checkboxes to select the files you want. This still seems like a lot of work, and it get’s worse when you need to paginate the list of files, as you would either need a form submit to move to the next page or use AJAX to track the files being added in real time.
What are your thoughts? Is this sort of thing useful? Should it just include all files or let you select etc? Let me know your thoughts in the comments
