flash finder

Flash Finder Scripts

Overall, this is a set of scripts intended to help determine the severity of Flash Deprecation on a training corpus. Additional scripts will be added over time.

These are PowerShell scripts for locating Flash-based content on a local machine.

Getting Started

As these scripts reference each other, you should either clone this repository or download it as a zip file.

To run them, you will need a PowerShell terminal active. To do this, either:

• Ctrl+R and type powershell, or
• Shift+Right-Click and select Open PowerShell window here

What's in the box?

The current scripts will tackle two problems:

• How much of my SCORM content depends on Flash
• How many (and what kind of) SWF files do I have sitting on my machine

How to use

As the PowerShell syntax might seem a bit odd, we'll start with an example.

Example

Suppose you:

• have zipped SCORM modules on a Windows machine,
• want to know how many of these modules depend on Flash, and
• want to check for everything in some folder at E:SCORM

You would browse to wherever you saved these scripts, open a PowerShell terminal, and type:

PowerShell -File find.ps1 -Path "E:SCORM"

Note: If PowerShell complains about your "Execution Policy", then you can bypass that with an argument:

PowerShell -File find.ps1 -Path "E:SCORM" -ExecutionPolicy Bypass

The window will then describe what files it's finding and eventually produce two CSV files:

• scorm-breakdown.csv, describing the quantity of Flash content within a SCORM module
• swf-locations.csv, describing any SWF files it encountered in its search

Example with Filtering

Suppose now that you want to filter for only SCORM and SWF content contained in specific paths and that our files looked like:

  - E:
    - SCORM
      - Courses
        - final_t1
          -Courseware
            - course.zip
        - testing_t2
          -Courseware
            - course.zip
        - demo_t2
          -Courseware
            - course.zip
    - Others
      - Testing
        - course.zip

You can filter for a matching path by using the -filter argument. If we only wanted to check those modules with paths resembling final_*Courseware, we could use:

PowerShell -File find.ps1 -Path "E:SCORM" -Filter "\final_.*\Courseware"

Running things individually

While the find.ps1 script runs the find-swf.ps1 and find-in-scorm.ps1 files by default, you can run either of those individually with the same syntax:

PowerShell -File find-in-scorm.ps1 -Path "E:SCORM" -Filter "\final_.*\Courseware"

Data Format

Each script will produce a different CSV summarizing the information it encountered during execution.

SWF Information

As the find-swf.ps1 script checks plain SWF files sitting in a directory, it can read the SWF headers to deduce more granular information about those files. These CSVs include:

• SWF Name
• Flash Version
• Flash Compression Status
• Creation Time
• Last Write Time
• Full Path of the SWF File

SCORM Information

The find-in-scorm.ps1 script checks zip files and tries to determine whether or not they are zipped SCORM modules. These CSVs include information about the quantity of SWF content within those modules:

• Course Name
• Course Iteration
• Package Name
• Authoring Tool
• Content Type
• Total Files
• Total SWF Files
• SWF Percentage of Total Files
• Creation Time
• Last Write Time
• Full Path of the Zip File