RoboMojo

RoboMojo

RoboMojo is simply a shell for calling Microsofts robust file transfer tool: ROBOCOPY.  You can get it (either the program itself in a stand alone MSI installer, or the source code) from http://robomojo.codeplex.com.

Update 24 March 2021 – the binaries don;t appear to be available on Codeplex any more (Thanks Guus).  But I have them here for in this zip file: RoboMojo v2.3.0.0 (2.5Mb) located on my OneDrive: https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aih2SayKCEIpgoxTgG7ytLWudQFtmQ?e=1GRvPi

RoboMojo let’s you set-up “Tasks” that you can get ROBOCOPY to do – avoiding the need to enter complex arguments everytime (and get them wrong – after all, to err is human).

With RoboMojo you can also set-up “Jobs” which are collections of tasks.

Before You Start

RoboMojo uses settings configured in the RoboMojo.config file.  The three settings to verfiy are:

• Morphological.RoboMojo.XmlDataProvider.NameAndPathOfDataFile – specifies where your RoboMojo Jobs and tasks are saved.
• Morphological.RoboMojo.XmlDataProvider.PathOfDataFileBackups – specifies where back-ups of your RoboMojo Jobs and tasks are saved.
• Morphological.RoboMojo.TaskExecutorMSRoboCopy.LocationOfRoboCopyEXE – specifies where the ROBOCOPY.EXE file is on your system.  The default setting should work for most users.

Using RoboMojo

RoboMojo has one main screen, with three tabs.

• Run: used to run Tasks or Jobs
• Edit: used to manage your RoboMojo Jobs and Tasks
• Options / About: self explainatory

The RoboMojo Jobs and Tasks you create are stored by RoboMojo, currently the only option for this is as a text file.  It’s called RoboMojoState.txt, and by default is kept in the RoboMojo folder.

Shortcut for Copying RoboMojo Tasks

On the Edit tab, drag an existing Task onto a Job in the main tree control, this will create a copy of that Task on the target Job.  The “Edit Task” part of the UI will populate with the details of the Task – beware that the new Task needs to be saved before selecting a different Task or Job.
Issues / Things to be Aware of

You can change the “theme” of RoboMojo on the Options tab, but the theme only applies to the main window, and it won’t persist if you close RoboMojo.  This feature will be completed in a future release.

The XML Data Provider likes to make a back-up copy of the RoboMojo data file (RoboMojoState.txt) wheneever you make a change.

All RoboMojo Tasks have a “TaskOrder” property; at the moment you can’t edit this via the UI – you’ll have to dive into the RoboMojoState.txt file and change it manually.
Using ROBOCOPY

Beware of calling ROBOCOPY tasks that write to special areas of the file system (like “Program Files” in Windows7) – if ROBOCOPY fails the ROBOCOPY cmd window will disappear realy fast (before you can read the error message.  The best way to deal with this is to get ROBOCOPY to write a log – this is one of the many options you can give to ROBOCOPY.

See the “Robocopy Options.txt” for more info, or manually invoke ROBOCOPY from a cmd prompt with the argument /?  I’ve also found this very useful PDF (http://theether.net/download/Microsoft/Utilities/robocopy.pdf).
Licence Stuff

• RoboMojo is free and open source software (but not the ROBOCOPY.EXE itself which belongs to Microsoft) and is released under the Ms-RL.
• The icon used is by Forrest Walter (www.forrestwalter.com/icons).
• The full licence is provided in Licence.txt.  Contributions welcome, for more info see: http://robomojo.codeplex.com

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