File Transfer Rules - Extended Ask-Wait-Action options.

There is an advanced setting in the file transfer rules 'When asked, wait specified numbers of seconds, then overwrite'. It would be nice if the action for this option was customizable. Overwrite, Skip, Resume, Rename, and maybe even Mark Failed.

This would allow a more consistent fallback if asked when not around. Since a 'resume all, skip all, etc' response to the ask popup is not remembered after an intentional/manual disconnection you have to re-answer this question again for the same transfer queue (if you don't want to overwrite). This can causes huge hold ups time wise (especially true for scheduled tasks). With extended options (including Mark Failed) you can limit the amount of time wasted without overwriting files which is not always necessary or desirable (and can itself waste time).

The reason the action for this is not configurable is because the end result is not clearly indicated, if for example the prompt appeared and then timed out and with the rule as skip the user may never know that one or more files may have been skipped. Sure it will appear in the log but if the user is transferring 1000s of files its not obvious and by then the status window might have been truncated.

Your suggestion "Mark failed" as an action is very appealing but I would need to do more research to determine if this would be a viable action.

I know that in v4.x there were some problems reported with the manual use of "mark failed", marking entries as failed so that they could be downloaded at a later time but the users who reported them never followed up with me and I never found time to investigate the issue further.

We check the failed state of an entry as part of how we determine which file transfer rule should be applied when determine if a normal normal or a file transfer error rule should be used.

Also when running a scheduled task (tools > scheduled task) the "Ask" action becomes "overwrite" and if the user stops the scheduled task for any reason the task will automatically abort and terminate.