I recently had a look at the Google Data API. Its looking good.
What I want to do is create a "G Drive" Type application. This will basically come up as a drive in explorer with its own icon. From there you will be able to drag and drop operations to and from Google Docs, and create folders. Yes I've heard of Gladinet and Memeo, but both are not great solutions. I've decided to build one from the ground up, and release it as open source, once its in Alpha.
Anyways to get started I need some advise.
Clearly I need a way to mimic a drive in explorer. Is it possible to create some kind of virtual drive then have its contents list from an XML file, rather than a folder on the HDD?
So if the XML file (for example) contained a collection of elements, would it be possible to have these elements (with some work) show up in an explorer window for the drive. Almost like changing the data source for the explorer view from file system to contents of a file?
Hack or not, elegant or messy, has anyone found some way to go about doing this?
The Dokan project may be what you're looking for
Instead of creating a drive look into creating a namespace which is how the Google Drive works
Just as a reference: virtual drives can be created using our Callback File System product, which is a supported, documented and maintained solution.
Related
I thought that symbolic links in Windows 10 behave similarly to Linux symlinks, i.e., they are transparent to the apps. However, I'm confused by the actual behavior.
As an example, I've both softlinked and hardlinked the same CSS file:
$ mklink softlinked.css Default.css
symbolic link created for softlinked.css <<===>> Default.css
$ mklink /H hardlinked.css Default.css
Hardlink created for hardlinked.css <<===>> Default.css
The hardlink behaves predictably (is indistinguishable from the original file) but I don't understand the soft linked one. See for example this:
Also, when the CSS is consumed by the Caret editor, the hardlinked stylesheet works fine:
while the softlinked is broken:
The questions are:
How do the symbolic links actually behave on Windows?
Can soft links be made transparent to the apps? By transparent, I mean the app would always see the file as being on the symlinked path (...\symlinked.css) and never resolve to the original path (...\Default.css). Is there some Windows registry settings or something?
Symlinks are transparent to applications that are using the underlying file system, e.g., CreateFile() and friends, unless the application makes a specific effort to be aware of them.
However, they are not transparent to applications that are using the shell namespace (for example the standard Open File dialog) because the shell treats symlinks as if they were shortcuts, even to the point of modifying the displayed icon. Whether this was a sensible decision on Microsoft's part is a moot point at this stage, since it isn't about to change. So far as I'm aware, it is not configurable.
In practice this usually means that symlinks will behave transparently for non-GUI applications and for internal files (DLLs, built-in templates, configuration files, etc.) in GUI applications, but not for the user's documents.
So your first two examples (the way Explorer displays the files and the behaviour of Notepad++) are features rather than bugs; like it or not, this is the way Windows is designed to work.
Your last example does appear to be a bug (or at best an undesirable design limitation) in the application in question. It might be worth contacting the vendor.
You should also be aware that creating a symlink requires administrative privilege, and by default they don't work at all over network shares. Personally, given all these limitations, I've never found them very useful. For most user tasks I would use shortcuts instead, and for most system administration tasks junction points are more reliable.
They should be transparent to most apps but some apps are to clever for their own good.
They might pass FILE_FLAG_OPEN_REPARSE_POINT to CreateFile, or be too aggressive when "verifying" file attributes and choke on FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT.
In your specific case, I'm guessing the advanced editor should use FOS_NODEREFERENCELINKS in their open dialog. The CSS switcher might be using FILE_FLAG_OPEN_REPARSE_POINT and you should be able to verify that with Process monitor.
There is no magical registry entry you can use, you have to contact the application authors.
A file is a pointer to a certain node.
When you create a hard link you are just making a new file that points to the same node as the original file.
When you create a soft link you are not making a pointer to a node, but to a file. Because of that soft link resolves it's path to the file it points to.
Since symlink contains both it's own path and path it points to it really depends on application developers to choose which path they want to put in their UI.
This question's context is the Windows operating system...XP on up to Win 7/8.
If you create a file on a drive and then create one or more hard links to that file, then if you delete the original file the file still resides on the disk since the hard links still refer to that file.
Is there some simple way (delete option?) to be able to remove the file and all of the hard links without having to search around for the hard links (not sure how you even find those from a simple windows user interface standpoint...I know you can do it with programming code, but I am looking for a user-level solution within the standard operating system user interface)?
Thanks!
EDIT:
I found this question/answer that discusses how to programmatically use c++ to find additional links to the file, but still searching for a standard windows UI or command line method. How to find all hard links to a file in Windows starting from XP in C++
Also found this link on superuser.com that doesn't give me much hope. Help!
https://superuser.com/questions/366739/how-can-i-find-hard-links-on-windows
There is a free utility called ln.exe that has a --list option that finds all of the hard links related to a given filename. Its download also comes with a batch file (DeleteAllHardlinks.bat) that will automatically delete all of the hard links to a given file name.
This pretty much addresses my need, so I will consider this a good answer.
Here is a link to the page for this utility. Hope someone else can benefit from this in the future!
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/ln/ln.html
So, I need to make a file storage for our team. Also I have SVN server. Opportunity to do rollbacks and control on who created or deleted file is very neccessary and important for our project.
Any ideas? Maybe without SVN. I can connect using WebDAV but only in read-only mode (because there is no LOCKS support in it).
You can set up the SVN server to allow exactly that.
Read the chapter in the SVN book about WebDAV and Autoversioning
So, what you want is the ability to roll back changes, and limit who can make the changes, but without the bother of checking in and out files?
Maybe Subversion isn't for you. I've done similar sharing with Dropbox and there's now BoxNet that's suppose to be like Dropbox on Steroids. Dropbox (and I assume box.net too) has some features that are very nice:
You can setup folder sharing between particular teams. That way, you can say who can and cannot access these files.
Dropbox automatically saves each and every version of a file, so you can always go back to previous versions -- even if that file has been deleted.
Files are stored locally. All a user has to know is to save a particular file in a particular folder, and everyone has access to it. I've successfully used Dropbox to collaborate with managers that make the Pointed Hair boss in Dilbert look like a high tech genius.
There's also Skydrive and Google Drive, but I don't find them as universal as Dropbox or as easy to use. It's possible to use Dropbox without ever going to the Dropbox website. To the non-geek, it appears to be magic as files I've written and edited appear on their drive. It took me a few weeks to train one person that he didn't have to email me his document when he made changes because I already had it.
Dropbox gives you 2 Gb of space for free which doesn't sound like a lot. However, my first hard drive was a whopping 20Mb which was twice the size of the standard 10Mb drive at that time. If you're not storing a lot of multimedia presentations or doing a lot of Photoshop, 2Gb might be more than enough for your project.
I know Windows 7 and later has some sort of versioning system built into it. I know this because anytime someone mentions that Mac OS X has time machine, some Wingeek pipes in stating that Windows has the same thing, but only better!. Unfortunately, Windows is not my forte, so I don't know too much about this specific feature. I believe the default is once per day, but it can be changed. This might be the perfect solution if everyone is on Windows.
Subversion can do autoversioning as Stefan stated. Considering his position in the Subversion community (especially his work on TortoiseSVN), he knows his stuff. Unfortunately I don't know too much about it since I've never used or seen this feature implemented. It's probably due to the fact that I work mainly with developers who know what a version control system is, and therefore have no need for something that does the versioning for them.
Also don't forget to check if you can use your corporate Sharepoint which does something very much what you want. I am not too impressed with Sharepoint, but if the facility is there, and your company can give you the support, it is something you probably want to look into.
Is it possible to sort of emulate a hard drive, utilizing Cocoa? I have a backup application, and I want my users to be able to browse their files outside of the app, in Finder, for example.
So, how would I be able to accomplish this? I know that some apps (Transmit) do it, but I have no idea how they do it. My best guess is that they add a folder somewhere in /Volumes, and then somehow mount it.
you should read about MacFuse. Read its Objective-C API here
Goal
Let me start with my final vision of what I'd like to be able to do first: In Windows, I'd like to be able to use a global keyboard shortcut that I define (say, Ctrl+Alt+C) to copy the full path and filename of the open document in the foreground application to the clipboard.
This would be useful to, for example, be able to subsequently paste the path & filename into an "Open File" dialog in an email client to attach that document to an email, without having to manually browse to the target document in the filesystem.
Specific Question
Now, the specific part of how to do this that I'm interested in how to implement is: How can I get the path and filename of the current "open document" of any arbitrary currently-running Windows application. (If this can't be done with any Windows application, then the next best thing would be for this to work with as many applications as possible.)
Obviously, this wouldn't apply to some applications that don't necessarily have the concept of a "currently open document" that corresponds to a file on the local filesystem, such as an email client, an IM client, or (usually) a web browser.
Application-Specific Solutions
I'm aware that it's possible to write application-specific solutions to do this. For example, the following MS Word VBA subroutine will copy the filename and path of the open document in Word to the clipboard:
Dim myDataObject As DataObject
Set myDataObject = New DataObject
myDataObject.SetText ActiveDocument.FullName
myDataObject.PutInClipboard
However, what I really want is something that will work for any of the applications on my system (or, again, for as many of them as reasonably possible) without having to try and write an application-specific solution for each one.
Idea: Recent Documents Folder
One idea: Could the Recent Documents folder (and/or its underlying Windows APIs) somehow be leveraged to help with this? It seems to have information about the same concept of "open documents" that I'm interested in here, that apparently applies across various application types. (Looking at the contents of the Recent Documents folder on my machine, I see entries in there that were apparently made for documents that I opened with various applications including MS Word, MS Excel, Eclipse, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Paint.NET, TOAD, and Notepad2.)
Preferred Solution Language
I'd prefer solutions in C# or C++ code, but I'm open to any suggestions for how to go about doing this, regardless of implementation language!
Windows 7?
Update 11/2009: Now that Windows 7 is widely available, I figured it might be worth coming back to this question and asking: Does Windows 7 provide any new APIs, or any other mechanism, that would help with what I'm trying to accomplish here?
The best you could probably do is look at the recent documentation registry keys, and get the list of most recent documents. Some sample code for working with this data is in this CodeProject article. This is saved in:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RecentDocs
However, this isn't going to show you whether a document is currently open or not. You could potentially check the title of all open applications, since many applications put document names in their window titles, but this is not a requirement, and many applications do not do that.
There is no mandatory mechanism for an application to specify its open document, so this is not generically possible.