shorcut to variable location? (5.5, 6.0)

Topic

New Reply

I want to create a set of shortcuts that can be dynamically changed by making one change that will affect all of them.
This is for some testing where I frequently use one of 5 different web servers with mirrored files on them. I have shortcuts to the 3 urls that I want to access on web server 1. Now, say tomorrow I want to look at those same urls on web server 2.
How can I make one change that will affect all of the shortcuts? I tried to do it with local Environment Variables, but ie, not surprisingly, doesn’t translate them, but uses them literally, like http://%myWebServer%/directoryA/FileN.http

Any suggestions?

Reply | Quote

Replies

It probably would be faster to create a single HTML file on your desktop that contained links to the pages on all 5 servers. Not as sexy, but…

Reply | Quote

What about using the QuickSearch IE power toy? I tried this out, since I often look at different servers with different versions of our product. QuickSearch doesn’t care where the placeholder for the variable is (%s in the URL). So you can create a shortcut with the server name as the variable:

shortcut = ccmadmin
url = http://%s:100/CCMAdminDev/main.asp

Now when I enter “ccmadmin hostname” in the address bar, it takes me to the /CCMAdminDev/main.asp page on the server I entered.

Hey, thanks! I like this. I can get rid of about 15 confusing shortcuts now.

Reply | Quote

Well, the IE Quick search is a slight improvement, but I have to specify the server every time I use the feature. I generally have the same server for a week or two, so I want to have a central location where I can specify the server name and have it reflected in the shortcuts.

Reply | Quote

Then I think JScher’s suggestion is best, or if you have IIS/ASP, make use ASP to generate the links so that you can set the server name in one place to update all the links. Or I suppose you could do the same with JavaScript on an HTML page.

Reply | Quote