I stumbled across Directory Opus the other week when looking for a better replacement for Windows Explorer.   I watched one of their videos on YouTube describing the features and I thought ‘ehhh, maybe I could use this’.  I tried the DOpus demo version for a bit and wasn’t initially drawn to it because I lacked the time to fully configure it to meet my needs.  I also tried XYplorer and loved the tagging features of it, but DOpus drew me back somehow.  I purchased the latest v12 DOpus release and have been happy as a bug in a rug.

Getting the hang of it

The pain with learning DOpus is configuring it.  It has tons of options and just when you think DOpus can’t do what you need, you find out about the configuration setting that solves the problem.  I has taken me a few weeks to integrate DOpus into my daily work-flow and I kept switching between DOpus and XYplorer before I really begin to get comfortable with it.

‘Lister’ would not be what I call this thing

One of the features of DOpus that I like is the ‘Lister’ or saved tabsets/views.  Think of it as saving Windows Explorer views.  The thing to remember is to save your views for different tasks and then create a custom menu button that lists all of your saved Listers (since I have not found a view that gives you quick access to switching between your saved Listers).  Some of my saved Listers includes one that remembers my latest project directory, another for burning image CDs (where one tab is the source folder of images and the other tab is the DVD drive to burn images to), and then another Lister of common template files I need to access.  One of my issues with DOpus is that it does not tell you the Lister you are using by default.  Again, this goes back to configuring DOpus to do what you need it to, but you need to play with DOpus a bit to know what it is capable of.  One of the configurations I made to show the Lister name in the title bar is set Settings/Preferences/Display/Options/Lister title bar:/Custom title: = %L – %P.  This shows the Lister name (%L) and the file path (%P) after it so I am able to quickly tell if I am on a general Lister or one of my saved Listers.

I also love the fact I can add buttons to commonly used applications and write scripts using ActiveX and apply them to your buttons which I find SUPER helpful and much more powerful than XYplorer.  The first scripted button I created is used to import images from selected folders into a PACS database, which would normally require me to manually execute DOS commands for each folder separately.  Here is the code:

 


/**
* @abstract JS script to be applied directly to the command editor for a button.
*/
// get the list of selected directories in the active tab
var selected_dirArray=DOpus.listers(0).activetab.selected_dirs;
//DOpus.Output(selected_dirArray.count); // simple output to message log
var enumFiles = new Enumerator(selected_dirArray);
// show a popup dialog with the selected directories
var dlg = DOpus.Dlg;
// selected_dirArray.count; // the number of selected directories
for (i = 0; i < selected_dirArray.count; i++) {
/* // uncomment to test the selected folders first
//dlg.buttons = "OK";
//dlg.message = enumFiles.item().path; // print parent path name
//dlg.Show();
*/
// we only execute the code if we are in the correct directory (note the path directories must be escaped with \)
if (enumFiles.item().path=="J:\\Dept\\Project\\Study001\\Radiographs\\J4"){
// we open the command line for each directory selected and import the images into the PACS using the folder name in each DOS command
var oShell = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
oShell.Run("cmd /k P:\\DicomPacsServer4\\dgate64.exe -v -frMAG0,"+enumFiles.item().name);
}
enumFiles.moveNext();
}

I am also looking to integrate Everything (a search indexing tool by VoidTools) into DOpus at some point, but I’m not there yet. If you are looking for a highly configurable replacement to Window Explorer and need a more sophisticated tool for handling your files and folders, DOpus is definitely worth the license fee.