NOTE:
This article represents one of four options for populating collections with remotely stored content. The topic of this article only applies to Player on Windows (and Composer).

Overview

One of the simplest ways to ensure a collection always displays the most up-to-date content is to populate that collection with the contents of a folder on your Windows file system. Changes to contents within the Windows folder are reflected in the collection at runtime without requiring you to stop and restart your experience.

NOTE:

• The approach detailed here only applies to experiences running in Player on Windows.
• This approach works with images, videos, documents, and 3D models. Other asset types are not supported with this method.

How to use a Windows folder to store dynamic collection content

Create a collection in the active scene using either a folder already added to your Content Library or by dragging a folder from Windows Explorer into the active scene (which also adds this folder to the Content Library). For a step by step explanation about how to add items into a collection, read this article.

The referenced folder is copied in its entirety into the Intuiface project and it is this copy that is referenced by the collection, not the original folder. The location of the copy is as follows:

• If your presentation is named New Presentation and is located in C:\Temp
  and
• If you have associated your Collection with a folder named Media

... then that folder and its contents are copied into the project as follows: C:\Temp\NewPresentation\Files\Collection\Media (see the screenshot below).

Every time content is added to or removed from this folder AND the scene is reloaded (either by leaving and returning to the scene or by triggering the scene's Reload action), the collection will update automatically.

Updating folder contents after deployment

With the method described above, each deployed instance of the experience will have its own copy of the media folder. As a result, updating folder contents would require that you manually update each copy of the folder on each Windows device running the experience in Player.

There are a couple of approaches that would enable you to remotely update the folder contents:

1. Updating one instance of the experience on one device at a time
   Share each folder copied into the Intuiface project files, and then use an FTP server to automate the upload of files into that folder.
2. Updating all instances of the experience across all devices at the same time
   See our article about how to replace the local media folder with a cloud-hosted folder provided by services like Dropbox.