Hi Guys,

With my work I need to check the integrity of a vast amount of old project files. This involves opening them with various programs such as Solidworks, AutoCAD, Word, Excel, etc. and checking if the file is ok. I was wondering if any of you have know of any software that could automate this process? As it is dull, time consuming and I'd like to get it done as quickly and accuartly as posible. I did a bit of googling and the only programs I could find are for protecting file integrity of files you already know are not corrupt. I want to discover and list corrupt files so they can be remade or retived from other back ups.

Cheers.

Select all the files - hit enter - go to lunch.

This involves opening them with various programs such as Solidworks, AutoCAD, Word, Excel, etc. and checking if the file is ok. I was wondering if any of you have know of any software that could automate this process?

The reason why its not possible to do this other than by opening and closing the file with its app is that the binary is a serialized set of objects describing the data. Unless you know the object structure of the serialized data its just going to be noise when you read it, with no way of telling bad data from good.

You need access to the source code to create anything that could serialize the contents of the documents. In normal (proprietary code) cases developers other than the application authors don't have access to this, and this is why utilities like you describe don't really exist.

You could create or script something that opened the files by examining the diretcory contents and opening the file automatically using VB scripting or if you have the skills to write it, a simple windows app. You could just call the Win32 API's 'file open' (far too lazy to look it up) function (exposed to VB Script) to do this. If its an Office-based doc you might have exposure via VBA to something more elegant.

You would still very likely need to manually handle the result of the file open but it would be some saving on time for you. If the notion of VB scripting is gobbledegook then you're probably stuck with the select all -> enter option :)



last edited by Hogfather at 12:59:01 19/May/06