In my Mac app I have an NSMetadataQuery to watch the app's iCloud directory. When the user decides to enable iCloud from within the app I do the following in this order:
Call [[NSFileManager defaultManager] URLForUbiquityContainerIdentifier:nil] to establish access to the iCloud container
Start a NSMetadataQuery to find all files (pattern: "*") in the iCloud container
Now I iterate over all files in the local container and move them to iCloud by using [fileManager setUbiquitous:YES itemAtURL:fileURL destinationURL:targetURL error:&error]
I have two types of documents that I move to iCloud:
The actual documents stored as file packages
For each document I have a .preview file as simple binary file
My problem is that the meta data query only returns my binary preview files, but not my actual documents until I relaunch my app (or open a Finder window of the app's iCloud folder from the Terminal - in this case my app gets another query result with all files).
So is this some weird caching issue? Is this because the documents are file packages and not simple binary files?
I don't see why that should be a problem. If I restart my app the query does return all files correctly.
Could this be a problem with the way my custom document type is exported in Info.plist?
Could this be a problem with the way my custom document type is
exported in Info.plist?
I suppose so: the issue you are describing is most likely because your document format is a file package (I assume written with NSFileWrapper). Remember that the package bit is set when writing the file, so if you have other apps writing to iCloud, that could make the issue much more confusing as it's not about interpreting a file bundle but writing it in a correct manner.
NSMetadataQuery unfortunately ignores folders, so your files will never be reported back unless you have correctly registered your filetype as bundle in the application that writes the file to the iCloud container.
There are a lot of similar and potentially confusing settings in the info.plist, so many things that can go wrong. I experienced an issue when I registered my document filetype correctly on OS X, but failed to do so on iOS: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14993694/388412
The first thing you should do is to go to https://developer.icloud.com/#documents and see if you're looking at files (correct) or folders (problem).
Work on your info.plist document types until you see the documents as files, then it should work.
Related
I followed the “build mobile apps with Xamarin.Forms” course. On the “store local data with SQLite in a Xamarin.Forms app” section, they say iOS provides two folders to deal with the files saved on a device:
the Documents folder, for user-generated data only.
the Library folder, for for app-generated data.
Then, this subsection is presented:
What I don’t understand is: is this the correct way to deal with the iOS Documents folder? I ask this because they explicitly say libFolder contains the appropriate Library location. What about the Documents folder required by Apple’s guidelines?
There are detailed information about different purposes of folders in iOS, in this document:
Documents:/
Use this directory to store user documents and application data files.
The contents of this directory can be made available to the user
through iTunes file sharing (although this is disabled by default).
Add a UIFileSharingEnabled Boolean key to the Info.plist file to allow
users to access these files.
Even if an application doesn’t immediately enable file sharing, you
should avoid placing files that should be hidden from your users in
this directory (such as database files, unless you intend to share
them). As long as sensitive files remain hidden, these files will not
be exposed (and potentially moved, modified, or deleted by iTunes) if
file sharing is enabled in a future version.
You can use the Environment.GetFolderPath
(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments) method to get the path to the
Documents directory for your application.
The contents of this directory are backed up by iTunes.
Library/:
The Library directory is a good place to store files that are not
created directly by the user, such as databases or other
application-generated files. The contents of this directory are never
exposed to the user via iTunes.
You can create your own subdirectories in Library; however, there are
already some system-created directories here that you should be aware
of, including Preferences and Caches.
The contents of this directory (except for the Caches subdirectory)
are backed up by iTunes. Custom directories that you create in Library
will be backed up.
Please read the document and feel free to ask if you have other problems.
Update
to access update answer:
iOS:
string docFolder = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal);
string libFolder = System.IO.Path.Combine(docFolder, "..", "Library");
Android:
string path = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal);
I have a sandboxed application that uses a document format which can contain embedded filenames. E.g. some of these referenced files are for image files which the user selects in order to associate the image file with data stored in the document. Whilst such images will sometimes be located in the users pictures folder, sometimes they are elsewhere. The document format itself cannot be changed for portability reasons (it is shared with an existing Windows version of the app).
In order for the app to be able to access the files whose names are embedded within the document, when the user selects a filename (using nsopenpanel) to be stored in the document like this, the app also creates an app-scoped security scoped bookmark for each such stored filename. It then stores these bookmarks by serialising them to another file. When the app runs again it loads its previously serialised bookmarks and uses them when accessing the 'embedded' filename and that works fine.
But when I copy such a document (and its associated serialised bookmarks file) from one Mac to another, it doesnt work, even though all the files the bookmarks refer to are known to exist on both Macs. What happens is that whilst the app opens the document file ok (after the user selected it with an nsopenpanel), and successfully reads in the serialised bookmarks from its associated serialised bookmarks file (which again the user has selected using nsopenpanel), and even though the exact same filenames that the bookmarks refer to are known to exist on the other Mac (and can be accessed by the user through finder etc), the sandboxed app still cannot access them. Resolving the bookmarks seems to fail.
The question is: are app-scoped bookmarks restricted to only working on the Mac on which they were created? If I cannot move an app-scoped bookmark from one system to another, how else can I achieve the effect I want without forcing the user to have to manually re-select every such 'embedded' filename with an nsopenpanel?
Tried to find the answer to this question in the Apple docs without success.
I take it it goes without saying that security-scoped bookmarks can only be used by the app that creates them.
No, because if this were possible, developers could save security-scoped bookmarks to sensitive files/directories on their own computers and then deploy their apps and have access to those same sensitive files/directories on other peoples' computers.
I'm trying to implement a class which uses a NSMetadataQuery to find objects within a specified location. I tried it with the user's Downloads folder and the user's .Trash folder. Querying the Downloads folder works find but the query for the .Trash folder always return 0 results (though there are files in it).
I'm creating an NSPredicate with the value of
((kMDItemDisplayName != \"*\"))
and the search scope
/Users/xyz/.Trash
But that doesn't work. Using the search scope
/Users/xyz/Downloads
works fine.
I have read that Spotlight may ignore invisible files. So I created a second predicate with
kMDItemFSInvisible == YES
and combined them both to an NSCompoundPredicate with an "AndPredicateType". But this doesn't work as well (neither works "OrPredicateType").
Does anybody have a clue?
Just to mention: I'm using Swift with Xcode 6 Beta 5, but I think that doesn't matter.
Edit
The reason for this all: I want to find ALL items within a specified folder. I could use NSFileManager... but retrieving file information from it is a pain (incredibly slow when retrieving the attributes file by file).
Depending on Apple's documentation it doesn't seem to be possible to use NSMetadataQuery for querying the Trash folder:
Note: It is important to remember that on OS X, while file-system metadata is available on all volumes, other metadata attributes are not. CDs, DVDs, disk images and System directories are not indexed by Spotlight.
I came across this information in the posting of a question I found on here:
"Apple has added an extra rule for apps being submitted to the app store.
We can no longer store arbitrary data files in the Documents folder. Only content generated by the user like a text file they manually typed and saved or a photo they took with the camera can be saved in the Documents folder.
We are now expected to store our app generated files in the Library/Cache folder instead of the Documents folder. In addition, we should mark the files we don't want to be sync to iCloud with the skip backup attribute.
Failure to comply with this will result in an app being rejected by Apple.
Reason: The Documents folder is now used for syncing to iCloud. iCloud does a sync every few minutes and if we were to have megabytes of our app generated files stored in the Documents folder, it would get mixed up with the user's own iCloud synced files."
This makes me wonder if the way I have used NSUserDefaults in my app is "legal" in the eyes of apple.
I'm making a simple app that takes user input in about five different places. I'm saving these simple strings in NSUserDefault variables.
My question to anyone that fully understands the statements made within the quotes above is:
Am I saving data in a way that is no longer allowed by apple?
I'm new to the development game, and the information within quotes doesn't make it clear to me (in the context of my app's situation) whether I'm in the wrong or not.
Thanks for the help!
NSUserDefault is the official, supported way of storing user preferences. If that's what you're storing, then it's the correct way to do it.
can somebody please help! I'm creating audio files using Xcode and placing those files in the 'documents' directory of my app, the point being that I can retreive them using iTunes and File Sharing.
I save the audio files as type .caf, I've created a directory list to make sure that all my files are actually there, they are. I NSLog the directory that the files are being stored to, it's the application documents folder. I have 'UIFileSharingEnabled/Application Supports iTunes Sharing' as TRUE in the info.plist. Everything seems to be working fine, EXCEPT... I just can't see the files in iTunes File Sharing. I KNOW they're there... I can even email them successfully from the same directory, but they don't show in iTunes.
Please can somebody help!
Thanks a lot!!!!
What you're saying doesn't really makes sense.
If you've done all the things you've mentioned properly, you should have had access to the application directory through iTunes.
Nevertheless, considering some problem still happens, you can do the following:
If you have SSH access to your phone (for jailbreak iPhone), you can use SSH to list the files on the documents directory.
If you don't have SSH, you have to solve the problem internally - through your application.
I recommend: List iPhone application document files