TechSmith Local Capture and File Events

Overview

Snagit COM offers capture event callbacks or completion polling, while local files can be observed with an operating-system watcher; these are local signals, not authenticated vendor webhooks. This skill converts noisy callbacks into durable artifact-ready events only after the file is stable and valid.

Prerequisites

• Approved local directory, artifact types, data classification, and retention
• One durable event store with job identity, source path hash, and processing state
• A bounded watcher lifetime, reconciliation interval, and shutdown behavior
• Downstream consumer contract and quarantine destination

Tool Discipline

Use Read, Glob, and Grep to inspect local scripts, manifests, logs, and tests. Use WebFetch only for current primary TechSmith documentation. Use Write or Edit only after confirming the target repository file and approval boundary.

Current Contract

• Prefer Snagit COM completion events where the client runtime supports them; otherwise use bounded IsCaptureDone polling.
• Filesystem watcher notifications are hints and may duplicate, reorder, or omit events.
• Do not emit artifact-ready until size and modification time stabilize and format validation passes.
• Deduplicate by durable job/output identity and reconcile the directory periodically.

Licensing and Authentication

TechSmith desktop activation is not API authentication. Resolve individual sign-in versus business-key or approved offline activation before execution. Redact all keys, account identifiers, activation artifacts, and sensitive endpoint details.

Instructions

1. Define allowed directory roots, extensions, stable-file interval, event schema, idempotency key, and lifecycle states.
2. Subscribe to the narrow COM event or local filesystem create/change signal required by the workflow.
3. Canonicalize the path, reject escapes and disallowed types, and correlate it with an authorized job.
4. Wait for stable size/time across bounded observations, then validate format, nonzero content, and checksum.
5. Insert or update the durable event idempotently before invoking downstream work.
6. Reconcile missed files, dead-letter repeated failures, emit metrics, and stop the watcher cleanly on shutdown.

Approval Boundaries

Do not expose the watch directory over a public endpoint, call local events webhooks, process actively written project files, or upload an artifact before authorization and validation.

Output

Return watcher scope, event counts, deduplicated identities, stability/validation results, downstream acknowledgements, reconciled misses, dead letters, and shutdown state.

Error Handling

Examples

The example below shows the minimum redacted evidence expected from a successful invocation of this operator workflow.

signal=file-change; job=export-441; stable=3/3; checksum=recorded; event=artifact-ready; duplicates=2

Resources

• Skill-specific official documentation
• Snagit COM event model
• Camtasia local-storage model