You should be careful when watching a large amount of files, and change a attribute that will affect most of them.
You will risk a buffer overflow and all the events raised will be lost. You can prevent this from happening by increasing the size of the buffer through the
InternalBufferSize property,but this can seriously affect your application's performance.
The FileSystemNotification class also has few events for handling the events raised. These actions are:
- Changed - raised when changes are made to the size, system attributes, last write time, last access time, or security permissions of a file or directory in the directory being monitored
- Created - raised when a new file/directory is created or a file/directory is copied or moved into the watched directory
- Deleted - raised when a file or a directory is deleted
- Renamed - raised when a file/directory is renamed
- Error - raised when a buffer overflow error occurs
Along with this article, you have a simple application that prints the actions you've taken to a certain directory.
Below, you have the simple way to set up a FileSystemWatcher. Note that tb_path and tb_type are textboxes, where you can select the path and type of files to watch.
watch.Path = tb_path.Text;
watch.Filter = tb_type.Text;
watch.NotifyFilter = NotifyFilters.FileName | NotifyFilters.CreationTime | NotifyFilters.LastWrite;
watch.EnableRaisingEvents = true ;
After setting up the FileSystemWatcher class, you need to handle the event raised by it. The simple way you can do that is by selecting the FileSystemWatecher object and go to Properties -> Events and selecting the event you want to take custom actions when it occurs.
Here is the main window of the application in action:
Attachments
Project Files File Watcher