Instructions needed for gui for windows

[carolth]

I have downloaded and installed the BDBAG GUI for windows. However, I don't see any instructions for how to use the GUI either on the github or in the help in the GUI.

Specifically, none of the options in the GUI are available to click to get started.

[carolth]

Can the GUI be used to help download and manage a BDBAG?

[mikedarcy]

Apologies for not seeing this issue sooner - somehow I did not get notified from GitHub, or the email notification auto-sorted its way into oblivion.

Admittedly, the documentation is pretty much non-existent. I would suggest looking at the documentation for the bdbag CLI application here, which details the functions for which the bdbag-gui has controls for. Note that not all of the functions in the CLI are supported by the GUI.

The reason controls are disabled when you open the app the first time is that the controls are all contextual; they enable or disable based on the context of whatever you have selected in the directory browser. So, if you browse to a directory that is not a bag (and not a drive root), you will see options to create a bag. Similarly, if you browse to a directory that is a valid bag, controls will be enabled for managing bags, like Materialize, Fetch, Validate, etc.

Yes, the GUI can be used to download/manage a BDBag. You can either use Materialize to an extract/download/validate in one-click, or the various individual extract/fetch/validate commands to perform the steps individually.