Where is the hosts.xml located on my Operating System?

Location of hosts.xml

The hosts.xml contains connection details to your censhare system(s). The file location depends on the operating systems:

• Windows 7, 8, and 10: \Users\<windows-user>\censhare

• Windows XP: \Documents and Settings\All Users\censhare

• Windows Vista: \Users\Public\censhare

• Mac OS X: ~/Library/Preferences/censhare
  If you are using Mac OS X 10.7 and above then you need to play trick to view Library folder (in the Finder menu "Go to" open and press alt key. Only then Library appears in the dropdown).

• Linux: /usr/share/censhare

Note: it's possible under Windows to customize the path to the censhare folder, where the hosts.xml file resides. Add the following line to the censhareClient.lap file, which resides in the same folder as the censhare executable:

-Dcenshare.preferences.dir=C:\censhare

The hosts.xml file

The hosts.xml file is an XML file on the local client computer, which contains the information about all available censhare Application Servers (= host) and their connection parameters.

A typical host entry looks like this:

    <host name="Server-Name" authentication-method="" compressionlevel="0"
          url="//192.168.1.4/corpus.RMIServer">
      <proxy use="0"/>
      <censhare-vfs use="1" hidden="1"/>
    </host>

A administration documentation for the hosts.xml file can be found in our product documentation.

The hosts.xml file can be edited in two ways:

1. directly, by opening the file in a text or XML editor. There is no DTD for validation, so special care is required to keep the file valid. The hosts.xml file can be found in the local censhare preferences folder (the location depends on the operating system) in the v4 subfolder.

2. per user interface dialog from the server preferences menu of the censhare clients.

If a hosts.xml file is used to store access data for a large collection of hosts, groups of hosts can be visualized by divding them with a dummy host entry which creates a separator line:

    <host name="-------------------------" url="//separator/corpus.RMIServer"
          compressionlevel="0" authentication-method="">
      <proxy use="0"/>
    </host>

It will be necessary to make this adjustments directly in the hosts.xml file, as the entries can not be re-ordered within the user interface dialog from the server preferences menu of the censhare clients.

The hosts.xml file can be created once and then distributed among all client computers, if desired.