Relative File Paths

[Dan Korn]

Let me try to clear up a few things.

First, you can use "regular" DOS- or UNIX/POSIX-style path specifications to denote paths in FusionPro, on any platform. So "../OUTPUT/" will work fine, as will "..\OUTPUT\"; however, in the latter case, if you're defining that as a string literal in JavaScript, you need to escape the backslashes, i.e. "..\\OUTPUT\\" since those have a special meaning in JavaScript code. The HFS-style paths with colons will work too, but relative paths with multiple colons get complicated and confusing. So I would just stick with POSIX-style forward slashes ala "../OUTPUT/" and your life will be simpler.

Next, you can definitely use relative paths in FusionPro, to access just about anything. Relative paths will be resolved in this order at composition time:

• The current working directory (mainly for FP Server jobs)
• The input file location
• The format file location (the template PDF for FP Desktop or the .DIF file for FP Server)
• The user-defined Search Path (set on the "Advanced" tab of the Composition Settings dialog in FP Desktop)

Finally, while relative paths can be used and will be resolved as above, this only applies to files that already exist. For a file doesn't already exist on disk, FusionPro will only resolve a relative path based on the current working directory, which is really only relevant in certain FP Server workflows. So you can't really create your output file in a relative location like this in FP Desktop, at least not directly. However, you can use a workaround like so:

FusionPro.Composition.outputFileFullPathName = FusionPro.ResolveFile(".") + "/" + gOutputFolder + fileName;

Note that the folder must already exist.