Sorting by date issue

[dalspot]

I am using Zoom on a website to build a search on literally hundreds of pdf files.

Currently we are hosting those files in-house and I have been changing the file date manually so that the 'sort by date' function will work.

We would like to move these files to a website hosted off-site. If I do that, upon using FTP to transfer the files to the new web server, they all are now stamped with the current file date. Some of these files go back to the early '90's.

Is there a way to preserve the file date so that 'sort by date' will work on a pdf. I'd rather not have to create 800+ .desc files

Thanks.

[David]

To preserve the date while transfering files by FTP you can place the files into an archive. e.g. a Zip file or a Tar file.

Then unzip the file when they are on the server. Most unzip programs preserve the date and time stamps.

This assumes you have enough control on your server to run an unzip.

Another approach might be to write a small script to automatically creates .desc files which can hold the date stamp.

[dalspot]

What about adding the date info as a meta tag to the PDF file? I think this can be done, but I am not sure as to *how* to do this with the right wording

Thanks

[David]

There are dates stamps inside PDF files. But as they are set automatically you might have a problem correcting them / updating them if they are not all already correct. I am not aware of any tool that does this, but I haven't looked for one either.

Further the date stamps are not extracted from PDF files, we just extract the text. And a 3rd problem is that the web server will still pickup the file system file creation date and return this in the HTTP header when serving the PDF file. And Zoom looks at the HTTP except when HTML meta tag "Last-Modified" is avaialble.

See also these old threads
http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3400
http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/showthread.php?t=240
http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2178
http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1787

[dalspot]

Can I create a .desc file ONLY specifying the date, rather than all the info? Will Zoom use both the PDF document info I have already created along with the date info in the .desc file? Thus overriding the UNIX file date when uploaded?

That might in the long run be the best option, as we can then make changes to the pdf and still preserve that initial creation date....

Thanks.