Frequently Asked Questions

Q: I am running Offline Commander/Internet Researcher on a computer with Windows XP. Suddenly, embedded browser stopped working and now I can not browse downloaded Web pages.

A: Your Windows XP has been updated to SP2. There are patches for software which fix problems with XP SP2. Click here to download and apply.

Q: I just registered my copy of Offline Commander/Internet Researcher and was given a "license code". I entered it into the registration field and it was rejected.

A: After the registration you should receive an Order ID, a Regcode (license code), and a Regname (your name). Copy an paste both the Regcode AND the Regname to the appropriate boxes. It is important that the Regname be typed exactly as provided upon registration. Do not confuse Order ID with Regcode.

Q: As a registered user of Offline Commander I was wondering if there is an upgrade option for getting Internet Researcher?

A: Write to contact@zylox.com and ask for a discount coupon. Registered users of Offline Commander are eligible for a 50% discount when purchasing Internet Researcher.

Q: Does Offline Commander support password protected sites?

A: Offline Commander supports both HTTP authentication (a dialog box that pops up when you enter a password protected Web site) and login forms on Web pages.

In the first case Offline Commander displays a pop up dialog box prompting you for user name and password. In the second case you should manually browse to the login page using the integrated browser, enter your user name (login name) and password, and click the submit button on the Web page. If you were downloading a Web site several levels deep, the download will continue beyond the login page.

Q: Is it possible to use Internet Explorer or Netscape when browsing the locally stored sites without using the Offline Commander interface?

Variation: Your program worked where most other similar programs failed. However, I would like to be able to download about 1000 pages and save the html source (which I will parse later). I did not see how that can be done with your program.

A: There's a button on the project toolbar called Export. After you download the files, click on the Export button and the entire project will be exported (saved as interlinked HTML files) to the folder of your choice. You can also export individual tasks using the Save As button on the Task toolbar (or a corresponding menu item on the Task menu).

Q: I would like to add 1000 links which I already have in a text file. How could I do that?

A: Select "Import Tasks" from the Task menu (or from the context menu) and browse to the file with URLs. Each URL in the text file should be on a separate line.

Q: Is there a way to download the sites referenced by a LOCAL html file that hasn't been uploaded to a web server yet? i.e., how to specify a starting FILE instead of a URL?

A: Prefix the full path to the file with "file://" (example: file://c:\folder\index.html). You can also drag the file either to a Drop Box or directly to the Tasks pane. After dropping the file you will be able to change the Depth in the Task Properties dialog box. If you drop directly to the Tasks pane while holding the Shift key a New Task dialog will appear. This will work for any supported protocol (file, http, https, ftp).

Q: I am very interested in your product, but I have one question. How will it handle database driven sites? Does it download the database too?

Variation: Does your software allow for offline viewing of ASP files? If your software does not have this capability, could you tell me who does?

A: Access to a database as well as CGI scripts on a database driven Web site is restricted to the owner of the site. Offline Commander can download only what is publicly available on Web sites.

Offline Commander can download any Web content including the content GENERATED by server-side scripts such as ASP, PHP, Perl, Python, and the like.

Note that ASP files are scripts (read "software programs") that generate Web pages. Offline Commander will let you view the pages generated by these scripts but to view the source of the scripts, you should have a password to access the Web site or know a way to hack it. Other than this, there is no way to access the ASP files themselves and no software (past, present, or future) will let you do it.

Q: I'm evaluating Offline Commander and every page comes back with a "cannot reach server" error. The same pages browse fine in IE.

A: If you are running ZoneAlarm (personal firewall), make sure that it does not prevent Offline Commander from connecting to the Internet.

Q: I have downloaded your tool to capture web sites and it works wonderfully. My question is 'Is there any way in which I can also capture my emails from a web site?'.

Variation: Can your product search a Web site for email addresses (either after being downloaded or scan it while online)?

Variation: I am trying to search the entire site for text like "MAILTO:" or "@" so I can find all references to email addresses across a site. I know there are many occurances of this in some of the sites I have downloaded, yet when I do a search for these words using your product, it comes up with "nothing found". Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

A: Offline Commander was not designed to capture email addresses. The integrated search feature will not let you search for mailto: or @ symbol (Offline Commander search works similar to Internet search engines like Google and AltaVista). However you can export the downloaded pages to a file system folder and use Windows search tool to search for any text including HTML tags and individual characters.

Q: I was downloading a large website with numerous graphics (~100,000+) and got several error messages "Database out of space".

Variation: When I download a large website I get this error message saying database size exceeded. This happens after downloading maybe 400 to 500 megabytes of stuff. How do I stop this from happening? I run Windows XP and I have 1034 megs of Ram so memory is NOT an issue.

Variation: I'm running Offline Commander on a Windows 2000 machine (PIII 500 with 768 MB and 1 terabyte of HD. I keep getting an error message telling me the database has reached its limit.

A: Offline Commander stores all files in a Microsoft Access database which has a limit of 1 gigabyte. If you want to download larger Web sites you should upgrade to Internet Researcher. Upgrade costs $30. Internet Researcher stores the downloaded files outside of the project database.

In most cases this happens because you have downloaded several very large files (zip, exe, cab) along with the Web pages. To remove them from the database follow these steps:

1. Find all large files by size using the integrated search tool.
2. If you want to keep the files export them by dragging them to a disk folder.
3. Delete the files.

Q: Please let me know how many URLs we can import from a list of URLs, as much as possible? 10.000? 5.000?

A: Offline Commander stores downloaded files inside the project database. The size of the project database cannot exceed 1GB. If you import a single URL that points to a 1GB file the file will consume all space in the database.

Average URL consumes about 10-20 KB of database space (after the download). This means you can import anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 URLs.

Internet Researcher (advanced version of OC) stores the files on disk instead of the database and does not depend on the size of downloaded files. On average, you will be able to import from 500,000 to 1,000,000 URLs into IR and successfully download them.

Q: Is there a way to merge two projects? (Even if it is a complicated procedure)

A: It is not a complicated procedure. Just drag and drop one or more tasks from one project to another.

Q: I am missing something, obviously, how do you open two projects at the same time?

A: Use one of the following methods:

1. You can launch two copies of Offline Commander at the same time. Open one of your projects in the first OC and the other project in the second OC.
2. In Windows Explorer double click on a project file to open it in OC window. Then double click on another project file to open it in another OC window.

Q: I am doing a research to some specific web site. I need part of data from the project file (*.ocp) by using Offline Commander. I know the ocp file is MS Access database. The problem is I can't extract data from the Body field (OLE) in Res table. I would appreciate if you can give some insruction.

A: The OLE field (which is a BLOB) can be accessed programmatically. Sorry, but we do not give programming advices. You can try Internet Researcher. It stores downloaded files in a file system directory instead of the database.

Q: How can I create bookmarks that point to pages within a project?

A: You cannot create bookmarks that point to pages within a project database. Instead, you can export a single task or entire project to the file system. Pages will be saved in separate interlinked files in a directory structure.

If you want to create shortcuts to pages within a task (meaning they will be available only within the Offline Commander), you can do this in several ways:

1. Within Offline Commander browse to the page for which you want a shortcut to be created and either:
   • click the New Task button on the browser toolbar
   • drag and drop the URL from the Address Bar to the Tasks tab. If you release the mouse over the tab, the task will be created in the currently open folder. If you hold the mouse over the Tasks tab for a second the tab will be activated.
   • drag and drop the URL from the Address Bar to the Drop Box.
2. To create a shortcut for a link do one of the following:
   • right-click on the link and select Create Task from the context menu
   • drag and drop the link to the Tasks tab
   • drag and drop the link to the Drop Box

Q: Is there a way to reorganize the content downloaded and keep the hyperlinks integrity?

A: If you reorganize the content, Offline Commander will keep hyperlink integrity. If you export the reorganized project Offline Commander will preserve the hyperlink integrity too. See the help topic How to Organize the Downloaded Web sites and Web pages and read the explanation below.

Each task consists of multiple resources (pages, images, and files). You can view the list of resources by clicking on the List button on the Task toolbar. When you browse a particular task in the built-in browser you can browse freely between the resources (pages) of this task as well as browse to pages of other tasks if the task this page belongs to does not contain the URL you clicked but some other task does. This is how the hyperlink integrity is preserved. For instance, if you download two linked pages by two different tasks they will be linked within the Offline Commader. Internally Offline Commander does no relinking to preserve the hyperlink integrity. If the requested URL is found in the entire project file, it is returned to the OC integraded browser. If you export the entire project to the file system, Offline Commader will keep the hyperlink integrity by relinking the HTML files when necessary. The result in both cases is the same: if two files were linked on the Internet, they will be linked both in Offline Commander project file and in the exported version of the project.

If you have a task with a Web site downloaded several levels deep and want to have another task pointing to a page within the first task you can browse to this page and click New Task button located on the browser toolbar (do not confuse with the New Task button on the Task toolbar). This will create a shortcut to this page from the Tasks window.

Q: Does Offline Commander have the capability of previewing a web site before downloading.

A: Technically speaking there is no such thing as previewing a Web site before downloading. To view anything you should first download it. You can though download 20% of a Web site to get an 80% impression of what it is. What to download depends on your needs:

1. Probably you do not need to download the entire Web site 100 levels deep. Download a Web site to the depth of 2. You can change the Depth value at any time before, after, or at the time of the download.
2. If you are interested only in the text of Web pages you can set OC to download only text and do not download images and embedded objects. You can specify this on the Filters page in the New Task or Task Properties dialogs. You can change the filter at any time just like the Depth value.
3. You probably do not need to download large files. OC is very flexible enough in setting the parameters of the download so you can specify for each kind of resource (pages, images, objects) the maximum file size that OC should download. Of course, you can change these values at any time too.