Working with individual files in Switch is quite straightforward. When files are grouped into folders (and sometimes in nested folder structures), you need to take the following information into consideration.
Switch distinguishes between two important concepts related to (and implemented by) folders:
Subfolder hierarchies provide structure to file submissions and to final processing results by placing files in appropriately named subfolders (for example, a subfolder for each customer).
Job folders represent file sets that move along the flow as a single entity, for example a page layout with its accompanying images and fonts, or the individual pages in a book.
Since both concepts are implemented with regular file system folders, Switch needs a way to know what it is looking at when it sees a folder. This is accomplished as follows:
Subfolders in a regular folder are always treated as a job folder; i.e. the subfolder and its contents are moved along as a single entity.
Certain flow elements (such as Submit Hierarchy and Archive Hierarchy) have special provisions to support a mixture of subfolder hierarchies and job folders; these provisions are configured through the flow element's properties.
Thus the complexity of dealing with both concepts at the same time is limited to those special flow elements.