Hierarchical Sessions

Some third-party PuTTY programs support hierarchical sessions, most notably is the Session ShortCuts program:

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Here is a screenshot of what the popup menu looks like:

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In order to make this work, the session simply uses a backslash delimteter by using a slash in the session name, which is translated to "%5C" in the registry. PuTTY itself just displays these sessions in a flat list (not a hierarchy), but otherwise it supports them fine. The problem is that WinSCP ignores these sessions completely when attempting to import sessions from PuTTY. So, there are really two requests here:

1) Allow WinSCP to import sessions that contain a backslash (%5C) and simply display them as part of the normal flat session list. (This one hopefully should be easy to implement.)

2) Detect session names containing a backslash as hierarchical, and display them in a list with sub-folders. (This one is probably a bit more complicated.)

Thanks,
Alan

Thanks for hint. I'll consider that.

It would be great to organize sessions in some other manner instead of plain list. For instance, I'm working with a lot of sites which can be groupped logically so it was very handy to use sessions folders and subfolders rather than huuuuge plain list

We also have a large number of sites to connect to and the flat list is getting unmanagable. If Winscp could allow directories in its list or if it could work with a local directory and store the connections as files. Any change in the flat list will help. Thanks.

I am glad to see this is not the first request!

I would LOVE to see some level of "grouping" for the stored sessions. The lack of organization is definitely a lot to handle with many sites, and a simple parent->child option (even if only 1 level deep!) would add some efficiency :D

Of course, I love the program so much I will continue to use regardless, but will definitely keep fingers crossed :)

FYI, there is a similar request in this thread:

https://winscp.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1970

Apparently, this is a desirable feature! :-)

This issue has been added to tracker.

Excellent, thanks! :)

I have attempted to test this feature in the recently-released version 4.1.0 Beta (Build 375), however it does not appear to work. I have a hierarchy of sessions that were already set up in SSC, and they have always displayed fine in PuTTY as well (although technically not organized into folders). However, they still do not display at all in WinSCP when I select the import feature. Am I doing something wrong, or has this feature not been implemented yet?

Thanks,
Alan

ADobkin wrote:

I have attempted to test this feature in the recently-released version 4.1.0 Beta (Build 375), however it does not appear to work. I have a hierarchy of sessions that were already set up in SSC, and they have always displayed fine in PuTTY as well (although technically not organized into folders). However, they still do not display at all in WinSCP when I select the import feature. Am I doing something wrong, or has this feature not been implemented yet?

No. Added to tracker.

martin wrote:

No. Added to tracker.

I'm confused. I'm one of the people who requested this feature about a year ago and who started this thread. Bug #34, which has been marked RESOLVED - FIXED, references this thread and indicates the following:

Make this compatible with TuTTY and Session ShortCuts

SSC is Session ShortCuts. How is this feature compatible with SSC if the import function doesn't work? What is the difference in the implementation of hierarchy? Why is there a new Bug #183 for this when it is already part of Bug #34?

Please don't mistake my comments here as complaints. I am extremely happy with WinSCP, and I very much appreciate your efforts to keep this great application free for public use. I am just confused about this particular issue and hope to clear up any misunderstanding.

Thanks,
Alan

ADobkin wrote:

Make this compatible with TuTTY and Session ShortCuts

SSC is Session ShortCuts. How is this feature compatible with SSC if the import function doesn't work? What is the difference in the implementation of hierarchy? Why is there a new Bug #183 for this when it is already part of Bug #34?

OK, it was mentioned in the original bug, but was not implemented actually, see the later comment:

Implemented. However support for importing the sessions from PuTTY clones with different hierarchy implementation may need to be added.

For the compatibility part of the issue, new bug was raised.

martin wrote:

OK, it was mentioned in the original bug, but was not implemented actually

I guess the part I am confused about is how this feature is compatible with any existing hierarchy model outside of WinSCP. PuTTY itself does not support any concept of a hierarchy, and SSC is not a PuTTY clone, it is just a quicker way of accessing PuTTY sessions and keeping them organized. It pulls the exact same registry entries from PuTTY's session list, so it does not duplicate or create any of its own sessions.

martin wrote:

For the compatibility part of the issue, new bug was raised.

Okay, so it seems that Bug #34 is just about creating session folders in WinSCP, and it has nothing to do with compatibility with TuTTY or SSC or importing these sessions from PuTTY. Is that correct? If so, then I am very much looking forward to Bug #183 being implemented so we don't have to recreate all of our sessions from scratch! :)

Thanks,
Alan

Thanks for implementing hierarchical sessions.

Waiting patiently for SSC support.