Hello…

Fantastic application and well played to you for coding it. I’ve been playing with it for a while now and have it running really well. I even had a look at the source code to see if I could add a ‘Watchers’ column but don’t really understand Java.

I buy and sell and use the Tab Properties to filter successful and unsuccessful snipes to different created tabs. I would also like to do the same with things I have sold/not sold but haven’t figured it out yet as I am not the winner, just the seller.

I have found a way of using JBidWatcher for separate accounts, although not simultaneously, and thought someone may be interested. First, I’ve changed all the paths in the .cfg file to the folder with the app in (separate folder for each account). Then I created a .bat file in the folder:

process -q javaw.exe 3
xcopy “C:\JBidWatcher\account1\JBidWatch.cfg” “C:\Documents and Settings\Computer\.jbidwatcher” /Y
“C:\JBidWatcher\account1\JBidWatcher-1.0.1.exe”

This terminates an existing jbidwather session, copies the .cfg file I want to use into the ’.jbidwatcher’ folder and then executes JBidWatcher. Works well when I want to switch between my buying/sniping account and my selling account.

My question is this… can I get JBidWatcher to use the folder with the .exe, .cfg’s in (\account1, for example) without having to use the .jbidwatcher folder at all?

Cheers for any help on this. It would save messing about with batch files and may even let me run 2 instances simultaneously.

Greetings,

Oof…

Well, there’s a lot you can do with:

javaw -Xmx512m -Duser.home=C:\JBW\user1 -jar JBidWatcher-1.0.1.exe

That’ll create a .jbidwatcher directory under C:\JBW\user1 for example.

If you also do that with user2, those should be pretty separate, although there may be some data that continues to get saved in the C:\Documents and Settings\{user}\.jbidwatcher directory.

Give that a try and see if that works out for you… You might be able to run multiple users at once with that, but make sure to disable the internal webserver for one or both of them, because the second to run will fail to open the port and listen.

Let me know if that helps!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Hello,

Cheers for your help. I take it that the “Oof…” was due to my sledgehammer approach!
I’ve just tried your code as the shortcut path and all seems to work really well. My directory structure now has c:\JBidwatcher\jbidwatcher-1.0.1.exe and tray.dll in. There are 2 sub directories with \user1 and \user2. In each subdirectory I have a \data folder for search.xml and auction.xml with all my .jpg’s etc. It also now has \.jbidwatcher with the 2 .cfg files in.

This method allows for self contained execution of the application and allows me to move it around PC’s (copied to c:\) and does not recreate the \.jbidwatcher folder in profiles. SUCCESS!

For anyone else reading this (because it’s not the first time someone has mentioned it in this forum), create shortcuts on your desktop for each account:

windir\system32\javaw -Xmx512m -Duser.home=C:\JBidWatcher\user1 -jar C:\JBidWatcher\JBidWatcher-1.0.1.exe
windir\system32\javaw -Xmx512m -Duser.home=C:\JBidWatcher\user2 -jar C:\JBidWatcher\JBidWatcher-1.0.1.exe

I have modified the .cfg files to save all user data into c:\JBidWatcher\Userx\Data to keep it contained for each account. I also created c:\JBidWatcher\Userx\.JBidWatcher before I ran the app with the shortcut and placed my .cfg files in there. No more Profile\.JBidWatcher
folder. Excellent work Morgan!

I’m sure this is as clear as mud but I hope some can understand it.

• Addition of a ‘Watchers’ column.
• Ability to filter items sold/unsold from selling tab.
• More distinct highlighting of item currently being updated.

Thanks for the help.
JB

Greetings,

Thanks very much for the writeup of how you got that working!

* Addition of a ‘Watchers’ column.

Unfortunately this information isn’t available except from the My eBay page, which is really hard to parse, in general.

* Ability to filter items sold/unsold from selling tab.

Do you mean ‘sold/unsold’, or ‘will sell/won’t sell’, or both? I want to add a ‘filtering’ search, as opposed to the ‘selecting’ search that I have right now, which might help with this.

* More distinct highlighting of item currently being updated.

Huh! I actually originally added that as a debugging thing, because sometimes it’d get stuck (in the early days) updating an item, and I wanted to know what item, so I could try to debug it. Can you give me an example of what you’d like to see it doing?

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Hello again,

Fair enough about the watchers column. As far as the ability to filter, I meant that I have created 2 new tabs called ‘Sold’ and ‘Unsold’. What would be ideal is that, when my selling item has finished, it is filtered into the ‘Sold’ or ‘Unsold’ tab as I can currently do with successful or unsuccessful snipes.

Finally, I have noticed that there is a slight alteration to the text colour of a listing when it being updated. I would like to make this text colour more prominent as I find it useful to see how far down my listings the update has reached at a given moment to give me a realtime understanding of how my selling items are doing (I normally have a selling list of around 50 items). I understand that close to the end of an auction, updates occur more often and it would be useful to see as I monitor the final stages through JBidWatcher rather than eBay. It can use up quite a bit of bandwidth but is a very simple and clear indication of how I’ve done.

I hope you don’t think I’m pestering as I already appreciate this very comprehensive and frankly brilliant application and wouldn’t like to give the impression that I’m bugging you for extra features. I just wanted to give you some feedback on it and answer your last question.

All the best,
JB.

Greetings,

As far as the ability to filter, I meant that I have created 2 new tabs called ‘Sold’ and ‘Unsold’. What would be ideal is that, when my selling item has finished, it is filtered into the ‘Sold’ or ‘Unsold’ tab as I can currently do with successful or unsuccessful snipes.

Do you mean the ‘end-of-listing item targets’ in the tab properties dialog? So what you’d like is a ‘Send items that someone bid on’ entry… That’s doable. Eventually I want to add filter scripting, so that people can write their own filters for tabs, but that’s for the next-next version…

I would like to make this text colour more prominent as I find it useful to see how far down my listings the update has reached at a given moment to give me a realtime understanding of how my selling items are doing (I normally have a selling list of around 50 items).

Ah, I see… Unfortunately, updates don’t happen in a clean order; it’s based on the last-update time, which can end up updating out of order from the items end-time. Hmmm…

Perhaps a new column which contains the last-updated-at time, so you can sort by that? Would that maybe meet your needs better?

I hope you don’t think I’m pestering as I already appreciate this very comprehensive and frankly brilliant application and wouldn’t like to give the impression that I’m bugging you for extra features. I just wanted to give you some feedback on it and answer your last question.

Don’t worry about that; I usually get my new feature ideas from a mix of my users and my own interests, and how easy it is to do. :) I try to funnel feature ideas into ones that I can see as straightforward to implement, and someday I really need to go through ALL the existing feature requests, and bucket them into whether it’ll ever happen… :)

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!