Log file location - Windows

[Perren]

Hi again 360Works staff!

Is there any particular reason / justification for putting the SM log files in a folder in the user's My Documents folder AND in a folder on the root system drive on the Windows platform?

At first I never even noticed because it's in the proper place on Mac OS (buried in ~/Library/), but one of my users called me today concerned that this folder magically "appeared" and maybe we had caught a virus or whatever...

Obviously it doesn't affect the usage of SM, but some folks apparently are picky as to what gets put in their My Docs folder.

Don't suppose you could change this behavior in your next release to store logs in %USERPROFILE%/Application Data or %SYSTEM%/Logs instead? Pretty please with sugar on top? :

Thanks,

--Perren

[Smef]

You're getting logs written to "c:/"? Is that correct, or did you mean a different location? I have not been able to reproduce this on our machines, and have not seen that happen before.

Logs are written to the Documents folder because that is a location that the user will most likely have access to. If the user is not an administrator they will probably not have write access to the FileMaker directory, and so we use the Documents directory instead, which is pretty standard practice. A lot of applications use the My Documents folder for this very reason. I've got 17 files/folders in my My Documents folder, and not one of them was put there by me!

The application data folder is hidden, and we want our users to be able to see the logs easily, as they are helpful for them debugging their functions.

[Perren]

Hi David,

This particular instance is a Terminal Services (Citrix) environment, so our "C:" is actually remapped to "M:", but yes, the drive containing the Windows 2003 installation.

Here's a list below of where I've found log files. SM was installed and initally tested using an administrative account.

M:360Plugin Logs (%SYSTEMDRIVE%360Plugin Logs)

M:Documents and SettingsperrenMy Documents360Plugin Logs (%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%My Documents360Plugin Logs)

Yes, I totally agree that users need to be able to get at these logs for diagnostic and debugging purposes, but the root of a user's home directory (for example) is just as accessible and available as their docs directory.

I get it if it's not possible, was just curious as to why this way on Windows and the other way on Mac...