Re: Virtual folder
Re: Virtual folder
- Subject: Re: Virtual folder
- From: Omar Qazi <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 21:21:15 -0700
On May 22, 2006, at 2:57 AM, Fabien Schwob wrote:
Hello,
I'm about to switch to Mac and I would like to develop a software for
Mac OS X. My application would be a virtual folder. By virtual
folder, I
mean that it's a folder that I would populate programmatically. For
example, I would like to create a folder that represent a FTP
server. It
is virtually empty, but file and folders would be added regarding
to the
content of the FTP server.
Interesting Question. Here is my sugestion: Create two applications
for the job. One will be a daemon, which runs on the system in the
background at all times. The other will be an application that does
not have a menu bar or dock icon (i.e. they will both be an
LSUIElement).
The first application will periodically list the contents of an FTP
server (or whatever) in the specified directory. What I mean by this
is that the daemon will actually create the folders, and replace the
files with XML Plist files with information about the file on the
server, such as the path to download it from the server, etc. Give
each of the XML files a special extension like vfolder. So if a FTP
Server contained one folder named songs, and one file in the folder
called MySong.mp3, your daemon would create a folder called songs in
the local folder, and an XML file in that folder called
MySong.mp3.vfolder. When new files are added to the folder the daemon
will also upload them to the server and replace them with vfolder
files locally.
The second application I described will handle the downloading of the
files. Make this application the default application to open files
with the extension vfolder. Then when a user clicks this file, your
application will automatically be opened. When this application gets
the message to open a vfolder file, have it read the file for
information about the file on server, download that file and replace
the vfolder file. Then send a message to open that file with the
default application (this can be done easily using the "open" shell
command). Since the application has no menu bar or Dock icon the user
will not notice the application ran at all.
I realize that this is not a "Virtual File System" as you said, but
rather a suggestion for an alternative method, since AFAIK Virtual
File Systems are not possible using Finder.
Omar Qazi, CEO
ROFL Software
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