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Re: Storing NSDocument data in packages/bundles

Subject: Re: Storing NSDocument data in packages/bundles
From: Markus Spoettl <email@hidden>
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:11:11 -0800
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On Dec 31, 2008, at 11:29 AM, Quincey Morris wrote:

It's rather surprising that NSDocument's save-as-copy-and-move strategy that works so well for single files backfires so heavily in my case.
Well, to be accurate, it's not a NSDocument issue, it's a problem with updating in place more than single file vs file package.
Incidentally, there's a fairly simple safe strategy for file packages:
-- Use a single "index" file that lists all the files that make up the current version of the document.

-- When saving, first write all the changed data to new files with new names.
-- Then update the index file atomically.
-- Then delete all the out of date files.
But that has a few drawbacks:
-- The individual file names are potentially different every time you save (which may or may not matter to you).

-- You need periodic housekeeping to detect orphaned files (due to saves that failed for some reason) and delete them.

-- Differences in file name encodings/naming rules might cause problems if the whole package is manually copied from one file system to another.

Sounds like it should be doable quite easily in my case. Thanks very much for the verbosity.

If you can come up with any acceptable safe strategy, then it's still an issue how to integrate it into NSDocument. writeSafelyToURL: seems like the obvious place, but its documentation says "must call super" if overridden, and calling super is probably going to mess up your strategy.

That's what I thought too. What's the point of implementing a different way to safely save things when at the end you have to use the built-in behavior. It really doesn't make any sense, I believe this must be a documentation inaccuracy which really meant to say "be sure to call super unless you're doing you completely home-grown saving stuff on your own". Pure speculation of course.

BTW, before you decide that long save times are unacceptable, take a look at how Amadeus behaves when saving large sound files. It has the best "slow" save (from a usability point of view) of any app I've seen.

Which brings me to something else. How does one do that, meaning how can I provide a save progress. I can't use a second thread to save the document because (I think) AppKit expects that -writeSafelyToURL: returns when it's done. Starting a thread and off-loading the work there so that I can update the UI while the operation is going on isn't going to work. An asynchronous mechanism where I can tell the document what is has been saved similar to NSApplications - applicationShouldTerminate: and -replyToApplicationShouldTerminate: would be what I'd need for that. Currently the only way of doing a save progress with user interaction is rolling my own save operation altogether, which has lots of implications (for example the behavior when saving in the process of app termination). Am I overlooking something obvious here?

Regards
Markus
--
__________________________________________
Markus Spoettl

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Follow-Ups:
- Re: Storing NSDocument data in packages/bundles
  - From: Quincey Morris <email@hidden>

References:
	>Storing NSDocument data in packages/bundles (From: Markus Spoettl <email@hidden>)
	>Re: Storing NSDocument data in packages/bundles (From: "Kyle Sluder" <email@hidden>)
	>Re: Storing NSDocument data in packages/bundles (From: Markus Spoettl <email@hidden>)
	>Re: Storing NSDocument data in packages/bundles (From: "Kyle Sluder" <email@hidden>)
	>Re: Storing NSDocument data in packages/bundles (From: Quincey Morris <email@hidden>)
	>Re: Storing NSDocument data in packages/bundles (From: Markus Spoettl <email@hidden>)
	>Re: Storing NSDocument data in packages/bundles (From: Quincey Morris <email@hidden>)

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