File System Organization for Xinet

Xinet works hand-in-hand with the file structure of your system. The way you organize customer and/or job files on your server affects which files customers can see and use, and how those files are organized through Xinet for their use. Xinet encourages you to think about how your file structure can support your preferred workflow and to choose a structure that makes sense.

The following subsections describe several Xinet-assisted workflows and file system strategies which suit them. One of them should work as a model for most situations.

The following topics are provided in this section:

•	Strategy 1: Customers have access to active and archived jobs

•	Strategy 2: Customers only have access to archived jobs

•	Strategy 3: You keep tight control over files customers can see

•	Strategy 4: You do everything by ticket number

See also:

•	User volume access and privileges

•	Business Rules Filter Administration

Strategy 1: Customers have access to active and archived jobs

If you would like to give customers access to all their files, both active and archived, you might want to consider organizing your files as shown in .

This structure provides the advantage of allowing you to archive and restore files exactly as they appear in your working directories.

Access to active and archived jobs:

Strategy 2: Customers only have access to archived jobs

Some production facilities may not want customers to have access to elements of jobs in progress. It is easy to arrange your files to work easily with Xinet in this fashion. This workflow needs a bit more attention than the previous one: you must move a job to the appropriate area of the file system when you have finished production. It’s a good workflow when you intend to use Triggers and Actions. Refer to Actions and Trigger Sets Quick-start Guide for details about these.

Access to archived jobs only:

Strategy 3: You keep tight control over files customers can see

Some production facilities may want tight control over files to which Xinet customers can gain access, even if it means extra administrative work. Working files would be strictly off limits to customers, as well as archives of finished jobs. In this scheme, you set up a “loss area” strictly devoted to Xinet downloading and uploading. The following structure shows one possibility:

Keeping control over files customers can see:

This “loss area” could even be on a separate machine or the other side of a firewall.

Here is another possible organization for Strategy 3, keeping control over what customers see:

Strategy 4: You do everything by ticket number

You can set up a file structure where you only use ticket numbers for Xinet organization, if that is the way you already track your jobs and don’t want to change. To do so, you would make a new Xinet volume every time you open a new ticket. You could automate that with a Xinet trigger (See Actions and Trigger Sets Quick-start Guide to get started), or do it by hand.

When you archive, you’d archive whole tickets to which you could also give customers access. The following file structure would be appropriate to this workflow:

An organization by job ticket number: