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Recycler

The idea to create Recycler came out of the realization that my Download folder tends to accumulate with an ever growing number of files and 99% of the times they are totally useless. You can of course just delete the Download folder yourself manually periodically, but I thought this would give a nice project to develop using test-driven development (TDD).

Recyler monitors previously selected folders and deletes files that go over a specified 'age'.

The concept of 'age' is not related to the date of the file itself, but it means the time interval since a file was first detected by Recycler and the time that has passed so far.

As of the moment it is developed in C# using Visual Studio but the end goal is to become multi-platform (supporting Linux and MS Windows).

Requirements

• Monitors folders, looking both for new and existent files
• Monitors age of files to determine when to recycle them
• File is new once detected and will age until is time to recycle it
• Concept of 'age' is not dependent of file time stamp
• Age is determined for the first moment a new file is detected and increases every new X hours (typically X = 24)
• Age depends then on local time (issue: changing a date causes recycling?)
• do recycle action once is file is old:
• delete (recycle bin)
• move to folder

Implementation details

Concepts

Age

• Determined for the first moment a new file is detected and increases every new X hours (typically X = 24)
• Not dependent of file time stamp

Operation is managed by 3 components

FileChangeMonitor

Detects file system changes (new and removed files).

• Detects file changes at a list of known folders. Creates a representation object for the change (a new file detected, or a deletion of an existent file). Publishes that change.

• Change is published to FileDescriptorUpdater which:

  If the file change is 'new file' -> create a FileDescriptor and stores at the FileDescriptorIndexer

  If the file change is 'deleted file' -> remove its FileDescriptor from the FileDescriptorIndexer

Auxiliary classes

• FileDescriptorUpdater - Updates the indexer with the change (new file: insert to index, delete file: remove from index) - see FileDescriptorIndexer.
• FileDescriptorIndexer - Keeps an index with the current monitored files information, including file 'age'. Examples of indexers: The plain text indexer, the database indexer.

In principle known folders are not recursive. But if decided otherwise, known folder A cannot be inside of a known folder B.

FileAgeUpdater

Periodically enumerates all indexed files and calculates each file 'age'.

Recycler

For files with 'age' older than recycling period, can execute an action. Actions can be: Delete, move to folder, execute(?)