Workflow to delete certain finder items

My workflow (which backs up FileMaker Pro databases from FileMaker Server) does this:
1. Mounts an AFP volume
2. Creates a zip archive of the data folder to an AFP volume
3. Changes the name of the zip archive to from name.zip to namedate.zip
iCal runs the script once a day and I would like to keep the 7 most recent versions of the zip files in the AFP volume.
Is it possible to have my workflow delete items in the folder when they are no longer among the 7 most recent? Or is it better to approach this using a cron script on the AFP server?
Thanks,
b.

You could also create a permission level that allows all users to contribute to the list but at the same time are unable to view the list. That way the workflow will move the item to the second list for everyone but Only X and Y can view the list.
Create a permission level call it (restricted contribute) or something along those lines. Then use the following settings and grant all your users this permission level on the second library. Keep X and Y with normal read write permissions.

Similar Messages

Does deleting Workflow also Delete Task List Items

I have Sharepoint 2010 and I am using the standard workflow.
I have created a new workflow and want to delete the previous workflow to avoid use.
If I remove the previous workflow, what happens to the items in the Task List associated with the workflow? Do they remain undisturbed or are they also deleted.

Hi,
According to your post, my understanding is that you wanted to know the action of the items in the Task List associated with the deleted workflow.
In my environment, I create a task workflow using SharePoint Designer and then start the workflow in two items. No matter whether I approve the tasks or not,
If I delete the workflow through UI: Click the Ribbon->List->Workflow Settings->Remove a workflow, the two tasks will be disappeared in the task list. However, the workflow will be remian in the SharePoint Designer.
If I republish the workflow in the SharePoint Designer, the workflow will be associated to the list again.
If I delete the workflow through the SharePoint Designer, the two tasks will be also disappeared in the task list. And the workflow will be removed in the Workflow Settings.
Thank you for your understanding.
Best Regards,
Linda Li
Linda Li
TechNet Community Support

Syncing and capacity issues - how do I fully delete certain iPod items?

Perhaps I just don't know how to properly delete files off my iPod. In short: Podcast items that I manually drag from iTunes to a playlist in my iPod don't seem to fully delete after I delete them from the playlist. And I don't see them listed in my ipod podcast area.
The bulk of my ipod consists of music I manually tossed on there. That portion never gets synced. And I haven't added new music in a long time.
I have three different podcasts programs I auto sync the last 3 episodes of (it was 5, but I reduced it due to the problem I'm describing in this post).
I also manually drag (via iTunes) some podcasts from my laptop to a playlist on the iPod. I do this once a week. The shows I move over aren't always the same, this is one reason I don't auto sync them. (i.e. I might decide to move over a really old episode of a program I rarely listen to.)
The podcasts I manually moved to the playlist seem to only show up in the playlist. They don't appear in the Podcast or Music sections.
Each week I also delete the contents of the playlist (by going into the playlist and deleting the listing of the playlist's contents).
*If I delete the (manually moved) item from the playlist then it appears that it doesn't free up the space*. Since I can't find any other mention of the item on the iPod, how do I delete it?
I'm aware that if I drag an item from iTunes to the iPod's podcast section, then a entry for the item shows up there. And then I can delete the item and get that space back. Maybe this is the proper way to move files and perhaps I'll start doing that. But at this point I just want to fully delete all the old items I can't see anymore.
Because of this problem I've had to delete more and more other items from my iPod to free up space for the new podcasts I want to manually move over. I'm getting tired of doing this. Thus, this post.
If need be I can provide examples of the exact steps I take, space left, etc.
Using iTunes 10.1.2. I've read some threads in the past about capacity issues that started cropping up in 10 or so. I don't know if my problems are related.
Thanks,

Note: by using a third-party iPod file browser, I'm able to easily see all the hidden podcasts (they add up to many many megabytes). However, the one I'm currently using, Senuti (free version) doesn't seem to allow track deletion from its browser, it just lets me transfer from the browser to iTunes.
Is there a (free?) file browser that will let me delete tracks?
Also, I haven't examined all of the hidden tracks, but for two of the podcasts shows, it looks like the oldest hidden ones were added on 6/19/2010. iTunes 9.2 released on 6/16/2010 and I likely installed it around that time.

Gmail - I cannot delete certain mail items

This is a fairly new problem. When I try to delete an item, it bounces back to Spam. When I delete from Spam it goes to Trash. When I delete from Trash, it goes back to Spam. The only way to finally delete it is to use google.com. Help this is driving me crazy! P.S. This is also happening on my iphone.

Hi AnneinFl,
If you are having deletion issues when using Gmail with your iOS devices, you may find the following article helpful:
iOS: Understanding Gmail Archive
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4207
Regards,
- Brenden

Can't use "Copy Finder Items" after "Run Workflow"

Create a simple Automator workflow:
Set just 1 action "Create Thumbnail Images" and save it. I called it "wf1.workflow".
Now create the second workflow with 3 actions:
"Get Specified Finder Items" action (choose an image file here).
->
"Run Workflow" action (specify "wf1.workflow" as a workflow, select "Return workflow results", check "Wait for workflow to finish").
->
"Copy Finder Items" (specify any location)
Now run the workflow. Everytime I get an error.
The log:
Get Specified Finder Items completed;
Run Workflow (wf1) completed;
Copy Finder Items failed
* -[NSAppleEventDescriptor count]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x113185d0
The same workflow works fine in Tiger, so I think there is a bug in Leopard Automator.
Am I right? Is there any workaround?

I can confirm I got the same results for the workflow, just don't know why as of yet. And then I somehow got it to work.
I checked the results for each action and they didn't seem unusual. The results of "Get Specified Finder Items" is a single parenthesized text string representing the file's path. The results of "Copy Finder Items" is an alias, but that should be okay.
So, deleted the thumbnail from the first run, and then ran the workflow again. It got stuck on "Run Workflow" and hung for a while. So I stopped it and removed "Run Workflow", and then added it in again. Presto! It worked, sort of. It didn't copy the thumbnail, instead it copied the original file. I'd forgotten to reset it to "Return workflow results". So, it seems to be something to do with returning the workflow results instead of the action input.
I'm going to do some more testing.

Maximum file/folder size for Copy Finder Items?

As I mentioned in another recent post, I used Automator a while back to set up a workflow that would Get Finder Items and then Copy Finder Items. Set it up as a iCal plugin. Worked fine for a long time, but I just checked and saw that the largest of the three folders (1.8 GB) was not being completely copied. The other two folders, much smaller (20 MB or so) were fine, but several folders within that large 1.8 GB folder were being skipped. I opened the workflow, and ran it, and it came up with an error that just told me to check the workflow. Is there a maximum size on this type of workflow? Seemed to work fine before . . .

The *Copy Finder Items* action will not make duplicate copies. If you want multiple copies of the same item, you will need to rename or duplicate the item before copying, since the copy action doesn't have an option to rename, and the duplicate action doesn't duplicate to a different location.

Multiple Extension in Filter Finder Items

Does anyone know how to make Filter Finder Items filter for more than one extension? For example, if I want to make a script filter for MOV, AVI, and WMV?

Well, it sure would be nice if the filter action would do that for you directly, but since it doesn't there are a few alternatives. You can use a Run AppleScript action to do the filters, a Run Shell Script action to do the filters, or use a bunch of Automator actions that do each of the specific filters and combine the individual results:
Tested workflow:
1) Ask for Finder Items (Type: Files, Allow Multiple Selection, Ignore Input)
2) Set Value of Variable (Variable: Source Items) -- store the original items
3) Filter Finder Items (Whose: Name Extension is equal to mov)
4) Set Value of Variable (Variable: MOV items) -- store filtered MOV items
5) Get Value of Variable (Variable: Source Items, Ignore Input)
6) Filter Finder Items (Whose: Name Extension is equal to avi)
7) Set Value of Variable (Variable: AVI items) -- store filtered AVI items
8) Get Value of Variable (Variable: Source Items, Ignore Input)
9) Filter Finder Items (Whose: Name Extension is equal to wmv)
10) Get Value of Variable (Variable: MOV items, Accept Input) -- add the previous filtered items
11) Get Value of Variable (Variable: AVI items, Accept Input) -- add the previous filtered items
12) View Results (or continue with the rest of the workflow)
Note that the Accept/Ignore Input item will let you combine or isolate the action from the results of the previous one.

Help with what should be an easy workflow.. copy finder item

Hello,
I am writing a workflow to backup a folder to an external hard drive. The flow first copies the folder to the desktop, then re-names it with the date and then should be copying it to an external fire-wire hard drive.
The problem is that the "copy finder item" does not work - only the last sub-folder in the folder actually gets copied. I can't figure out what the problem is. This seems to affect both the copy to the desktop and then the subsequent copy to the firewire drive. Puzzlingly, it sometimes seems to work and copy the whole folder!
Any advice?
Jonathan

Well, I don't know what's causing your problem, but let me suggest an optimization. Unless you have a specific reason to want this, there's absolutely no reason to copy the folder twice. Right now, you're copying to the desktop, renaming the folder, then copying to the external drive. Presumably, you must at some point delete the copy on the desktop. Copying twice means the backup will be half as fast as it could be. It also introduces extra room for errors by increasing the complexity of the task.
Instead, copy the folder to the destination on the external drive, then rename it once it's there. Perhaps, if you're lucky, in making this change, your problem will solve itself.

Finder in CoverFlow behaves incorrectly when you delete the top item

Put Finder in CoverFlow mode, delete the top item from the file list, observe that the Cover of the deleted item is still shown in the CovderFlow window but the "file name" has been deleted from the file list. Scroll down and notice that the Cover shown for the selected item is ONE item out of sync. If you close and reopen the Finder window you are once again in sync. I have not checked if this happens with anything but the top item. This makes things very confusing...I haven't found a fix for this yet...and ideas?

dvp2012,
See the X Labs -> http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/trash.html#Anchor-Files-46919.
Good luck,
Clinton
MacBook Pro (15” Late 2011), OS X Yosemite 10.10, 16GB Crucial RAM, 960GB M500 Crucial SSD, 27” Apple Thunderbolt Display

Backup workflow fails - Find Finder Items

I have tried to put together a simple Automator workflow to backup recently changed files to a CD as follows:
[Find Finder Items]: Where:[Top level folder] Whose:[Date Modified]:[Within the last 2 weeks]
[Create Archive]: Save As:[Archive File Name] Where:[Desktop] Ignore unreadable items
[Burn a Disk]: ...
After Create Archive has run I have a Zip file on the Desktop, but it contains far more than just the files modded in the last two weeks. Even if I reduce the [Date Modified] criterion to [This Week] I get the same result.
Any idea what I'm doing wrong?
I've set up a Smart Folder in Finder to list the files using the same search criteria, and it produces a reasonable list. I thought of trying to archive the contents of the Smart Folder, but that just archives the Smart Folder definition file, not the files it points to.

Whoops! I can now answer this one myself!
It turns out that if a folder contains a recently modified file it is included in the items, and then the entire contents of that folder are included in the archive. I was able to solve the problem by adding a second criterion to the [Find Finder Items] action: Kind Is Not Folder. The Zip file still contains a hierarchical folders/files structure, but now only the recently-changed files are included.

Workflow and/ or script to rename finder items using a .txt or a .csv file as a reference?

Can someone assist me, I am looking for a workflow and/ or script that would allow me to rename finder items using a .txt or a .csv file as a reference for the new naming convention?

THANK YOU!!!!
I have taken your recommendation and enabled the script menubar item. I also tweeked the script as you recommended, I will play with both options to see which I prefer.   I thank you again for the quick turn around on this.
If I am to understand your comment correctly about placing the .csv file in the same folder as the files to be renamed I should modify the script as such.
REMOVE:
                    set csvFile to choose file with prompt "Select the CSV file." of type "public.text"
                    set workingFolder to (choose folder "Select the folder to be processed") as text
                    set fileList to (POSIX path of (files of folder workingFolder whose visible is true and name begins with "untitled"))
REPLACE WITH:
                    set csvList to paragraphs of (read "/path/to/csvfile.csv")
                      set fileList to (POSIX path of (files of folder "/pah/to/folder" whose visible is true andname begins with "untitled"))
After reading this and attempting to modify it I am missing one piece of markup or the arrangement of the markup.
Please find the modified script with options:
-- change this to specify the correct csv delimiter
set splitDelimiter to ","
-- change this to specify the file name join character
set recombineDelimiter to "_"
-- choose the csv file
set csvFile to choose file with prompt "Select the CSV file." of type "public.text"
-- choose the folder
set workingFolder to (choose folder "Select the folder to be processed") as text
-- csv contents as list
set csvList to paragraphs of (read csvFile)
--set csvList to paragraphs of (read "/path/to/csvfile.csv")
tell application "System Events"
-- list of files in alphabetical order
     set fileList to (POSIX path of (files of folder workingFolder whose visible is true and name begins with "untitled"))
-- set fileList to (POSIX path of (files of folder "/path/to/folder" whose visible is true and name begins with "untitled"))
     repeat with i from 1 to count of fileList
-- get a file from the file list and note its extension
          set currentFile to file (item i of fileList)
          set fileExtension to name extension of currentFile
-- get a line from the csv list, split it at the delimiter, and recombine it
          set {oldTID, my text item delimiters} to {my text item delimiters, splitDelimiter}
          set newFileNamePieces to text items of (item i of csvList)
          set my text item delimiters to recombineDelimiter
          set newFileName to newFileNamePieces as text
          set my text item delimiters to oldTID
-- write the new name back out to the file
          set name of currentFile to (newFileName & "." & fileExtension)
     end repeat
end tell

IMac: I try to save a file and get 'the action "Copy Finder Items" encountered an error. Check the action's properties and try running the workflow again.'

I keep on running into this when I try to save a download file. Any help would be appreciated.
'The action "Copy Finder Items" encountered an error. Check the action's properties and try running the workflow again.'
I tried clicking the button to change the save but that has no effect.

Hi All,
I am having same issue too. Can anyone you advise? Thank you.

Error: "The workflow could not delete the list item"

Have set up 2 lists: Events and EventsArchive. They have all the same fields. I have created a workflow in SPD using an impersonation step (I have Full control of the site/site collection). Workflow is essentially this:
    If Curent Item:Expired
equals
Yes
       Copy item in Current Item to
EventsArchive
       then Delete item in
Current Item.
The item is copying over to the EventsArchive list just fine, but the "delete" part is not happening. Instead, I get the following error:
The workflow could not delete the list item. Make sure the list exists and the user has permissions to delete items in the list.
The list obviously exists (or I wouldn't be able to copy an item from it), and I have as much permissions as anyone can have, so I'm not sure where else to turn with this.
Thanks in advance for your help!

Hi,
To test the issue, I create a simple workflow without using Impersonation step:
It works.
Could you please create new lists to avoid custom settings and test the issue again?
Similar thread:
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/3fa94026-4487-4e4c-a5b4-12a79d6ee6a2/workflow-delete-item-not-working?forum=sharepointcustomizationprevious
Regards,
Rebecca Tu
TechNet Community Support
Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help, and unmark the answers if they provide no help. If you have feedback for TechNet Support, contact
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"Run Workflow" action in Automator does not "Ask for Finder Items"

So I have a workflow called step_1 that does a bunch of stuff . . . in essence, it "Asks for a Finder Item" and then runs some Python shells and then outputs an Applescript format list {'item_1','item_2','item_3'}
I'm trying to use this workflow in another workflow so I selected "Run Workflow" in Automator and located my original workflow step_1 but when I run it, the process goes straight through the workflow and doesn't "Ask for Finder Items" so i'm sure it doesn't do anything else in the workflow either. It doesn't give me an error, it just pretty much bypasses everything within the workflow and it's pretty annoying.
Any idea on how to get my workflow to work using "Run Workflow" ?

Never tired Run Workflow before so as as a test I rn these two
and the Ask for Finder items in the called workflow ran OK.
Note this was run from Automator. One thing I did see was that the Ask for finder items window did not come to the front and I had to look under my open windows to see it.

Automator Filter Finder Items

A very simple task, which I have attempted to figure out many times over the last few months; but my repeated attempts haven't been successful. This should be easy for someone to resolve…
I would like to strip out all the files of a certain extension (.txt) from an hierarchy of nested folders, & move them to the Trash. (Told you it was easy!)
Here's what I think ought to work:
• Create an Automator Workflow
• 'Ask for Finder Items' to select the topmost folder
• 'Get Folder Contents' with 'Repeat for each subfolder found' — (the results successfully include all the relevant files)
• 'Filter Finder Items': "find files where any of the following are true: file extension is .txt" — (I tried "txt" as well as ".txt")
• 'Move Finder Items to Trash'.
The files turn up (alongside loads of other junk) in the 'Get Folder Contents' step, & they are reported in the results; but when I try to filter out everything apart from the .txt files, so that only the .txt files remain, the filter reports no results.
So the 'Filter Finder Items' action completes with no results, & with a warning that: The action “Move Finder Items to Trash” was not supplied with the required data.
I think it must be something obvious, but I can't figure it out, & although I've searched extensively online, everyone else with similar problems has other complications which get resolved… so they lose interest just at the point where I think they're going to reveal the solution.

You need to understand the issues here. Automator was released with 10.4 (Tiger), and many of the core automator actions date from that time. This introduces forward-compatability problems: things that should work (and maybe did work) in 10.4 might not work as specified in 10.6, depending on if/how the underlying cocoa APIs have changed. Now, in the best of all possible worlds, Apple would update automator actions with each new upgrade, but it's probably not needed for the bulk of the actions, and Apple may not be aware of problems that do exist with given actions (that depends on whether people filed meaningful bug reports on them).
Don't be confused by the seeming simplicity of what I did: the Move Finder Items to Trash action probably uses cocoa file system APIs directly, whereas my applescript leverages the developed programmatic underpinnings of the Finder - the Finder has a built-in system for moving files in bulk, whereas the action is obviously moving files one at a time (which is where things are getting congested).
Filter Finder Items seems to be a simple metadata search (just another use of the spotlight framework, which hasn't changed much since its inception) so I can't see any way in which it would fail. it is, of course, limited by the same things that spotlight is limited by - it won't find material that's not indexed and may not do exactly what one always expects (e.g., may not recognize an extension as an extension unless the extension belongs to an app registered with the system) but other than that there's very little it can do wrong. As a general rule, actions that deal only with manipulating automator data (e.g. modifying references passed from one action to the next) won't break. You'll only see breakage with actions that need to access exterior frameworks that have changed significantly since the actions were created.
That's the best answer you're going to get: one can't prove a negative, so there's no way to demonstrate that FFI isn't broken. it's easy enough to check for a given task, though - just run the workflow you have on a test folder without the deleting action, check the results window, and compare it to the results you expect (which you can gather by eye in a Finder search window, through an applescript, through an app that will report the number of files of given types in a folder…).

Workflow to delete certain finder items

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