Description of version 4.04 enhancements
----------------------------------------
Released 2 June 1999

Version 4.04 is primarily a maintenance release, together with examples
of how foldertree's powerful capabilities can be further exploited.

The first demonstration is a Perl CGI script, which can be used to 
emulate a Windows Explorer style user interface for a directory structure. 
The menu is generated automatically from the directory and file structure. 
This could be adapted to link directly to a database.
This example can be accessed from the foldertree home page, or by going to 
"http://www.essence.co.uk/cgi-bin/essence-explore.pl". 
The Perl script is available to purchasers of the full license.

The second demonstration shows how foldertree can be used to dynamically 
download menu information. Foldertree version 4 has always been able to 
dynamically update the document objects from the client Javascript data structures. 
This example goes a step further, and dynamically updates the client JavaScript 
data structures by donwloading from the web. This avoids the start-up 
bottleneck of waiting for all the data to be downloaded. 
This can be seen in example 4, which can be accessed from the documentation
and is available for evaluation users.

The whole foldertree script has undergone an internal redesign. This does not 
affect its usage, but has reduced the overall size by nearly 10 K bytes.

The set of icons has been modified. The size of the files has been reduced, 
and the icons have blank space removed. To compensate, a default value of 
folderIconSpace and documenticonSpace (see below) has been set to 8 pixels.

A demonstration prototype tool to help configure the user 
interface is provided in the file devtool.htm.

############################

Minor enhancements include:

 - ability to set <BODY> options, using the option bodyOption, where browsers do
not support style sheets. The string bodyOption is inserted within the <BODY> tag.

 - ability to prevent display of files, using the option nDocs. This was 
needed to emulate the left hand side of the Windows Explorer style.

 - ability to set user defined properties on nodes. This was needed for the 
Windows Explorer style interface, to allow properties such as file size and 
modification date to be stored.

 - ability to set the path of the foldertree scripts, applets and html files, 
using the option ftFolder.

 - ability to define a link using a substring 'this.id', which becomes 
converted into the value of the id property of a node when creating the DHTML.

 - folderIconSpace and documentIconSpace now refer to the space AFTER the icon, 
whereas in version 4.03 they referred to the space each side of the icon. 
This modification has dependencies with the removal of space from the icon images. 
If you previously used all defaults, no further changes are required, but if you 
set folderIconSpace or documentIconSpace, you will need to change these values 
and take account of the fact that the new icons do not have any space after them. 
The default values for folderIconSpace and docuemntIconSpace are 8 pixels. This
is the same amount by which blank space was removed from the icon right hand side.

################################

Bugs corrected include:

 - problems when foldertree is run within some other overall frameset. 
The problem arose becuase a reference to 'top' was made, which normally worked, 
but if foldertree is within another frameset 'top' refers to the overall frameset 
and the references were invalid. Note that this involves changing any 
references in HTML to 'top' to 'self'. HTML files such as ftexampl0.htm 
have been suitably modified, but if you are upgrading you will need to 
modify your own HTML files.

 - correction of appearance of tags in status bar and tool tips

 - correction of viewing of JavaScript source with Netscape

 - correction of a rendering problem with Netscape. The source of the problem 
is a bug in Netscape, which does not always render correctly when a document 
size is reduced (i.e. folders are collapsed). Foldertree implements a work around which
is cautious in reducing document height. This means that there is sometimes some 
blank space at the bottom of the menu.

 - correction of problems with gap between top of menu frame and top of menu.

Other improvements include caching of images in image arrays, where available, 
improved error reporting, including a trace back, and various improvements in 
documentation and web design.