To decide what will be processed with an Action, you need to define how your files and folders will be filtered by DropIt. You can do it defining some Rules and some Additional Filters for your Association.

DropIt offers several filters for your files and folders:

• in the “Rules” field you have to define one or more filters by filename and/or path;
• from the “Rule Settings” button (the “blue i”) you find some examples and you can define to consider Rules as Regular Expressions (for advanced users);
• from the “Additional Filters” button (the “gray funnel”) you can also configure to filter files and folders by their properties (size, date, attributes and more).

Files and folders that will match with the filters of an Association, will be processed with the related Action during the process.

Each file and folder on your hard drive has a path that defines “where it is”. Something like this:
C:\Example\Of\Directory\File.jpg

DropIt allows to “decide what process with an action” checking paths. In Rules field you can define to detect files and folders by their:

• location (C:\Example\Of\Directory\File.jpg)
• name (C:\Example\Of\Directory\File.jpg)
• extension (C:\Example\Of\Directory\File.jpg)

Basically you need to type the path of files/folders you want to consider, using asterisks to say “this part can be anything”. You can use single asterisks * for files, for example:

• *.jpg means “consider files from any location (because not defined), with any name (because of the asterisk), with jpg extension (JPG or Jpg are the same, because Rules are case insensitive)”
• penguin* means “consider files from any location, with name that begins with penguin (because asterisk is only after), with any extension (or also without extension, because not defined)”
• *rose* means “consider files from any location, with name that contains rose (the asterisk means zero or more characters, so also rose or roses or 10_rose are considered), with any extension”
• C:\Folder\*.jpg means “consider files from C:\Folder directory, with any name, with jpg extension”
• C:\*\Photos\* means “consider files contained in Photos folder from any directory of C:\, with any name and any extension”

Or double asterisks ** for folders, for example:

• images** means “consider folders from any location, with name that begins with images”
• **temp** means “consider folders from any location, with name that contains temp”
• C:\**docs means “consider folders from C:\ directory, with name that ends with docs”
• C:\**\Photos\** means “consider folders contained in Photos folder from any directory of C:\, with any name”

Sometimes you may need to create general associations to process all dropped files and folders. In these cases you can use the following special Rules:

• * means “consider all files”
• ** means “consider all folders”
• # means “consider all files without other matches”
• ## means “consider all folders without other matches”

If you want to use several Rules in the same association, you can separate them with ; or | characters. For example:

• *.jpg;*.png means “consider all files with jpg or png extension”
• sea**|mountain** means “consider all folders with names that begin with sea or mountain”

If you need to exclude some files or folders from the matching, you can use / character. For example:

• *.jpg/sea* means “consider all files with jpg extension, except files with names that begin with sea”
• **docs**/**temp** means “consider all folders with name that contains docs, except folders with name that contains also temp”
• *.jpg/sea*;*.png/fly* means “consider all jpg files except if begin with sea and all png files except if begin with fly”

If you want, you can also use Abbreviations in Rules. For more info about them you can read the page:
How to customize destinations

Finally, if you are an advanced user, you can enable a feature to consider Rules as Regular Expressions (instead of use the previously described syntax). You can do it for the desired associations from “Rule Settings” button. You can find more info about this alternative syntax from here:
http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/functions/StringRegExp.htm

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