You are probably familiar with this feature of the Workplace Shell. If you have a folder open and manipulate files in that folder from the command line, you will see that the WPS magically will know about these modifications and refresh the folder automatically.

While this is a great feature in theory, there are severe limitations with the standard implementation of this in the WPS. Most importantly, the WPS will create excessive file-system handles for all objects that are auto-refreshed, which will unnecessarily blow up your INI files. Note that this even happens if you have the AUTOREFRESHFOLDERS=NO setting in your &cfgsys; file.

&xwp; can now replace this entire mechanism if you have enabled this replacement on the "Features" page in the "&xwp; Setup" object.

If the replacement is enabled, &xwp; will prevent the internal WPS threads which are responsible for folder auto-refresh from running. Among other things, this will prevent file-system handles from being created. Instead, &xwp; will start its own threads which will start monitoring file-system activity and automatically refresh folders then.

Note that as a result, enabling or disabling the replacement requires a Desktop restart because &xwp; can only do this replacement while the WPS is starting up.

However, once the replacement has been enabled and the WPS has been restarted, you can enable and disable folder auto-refresh on the "View" page in the "Workplace Shell" object without having to restart the WPS.