Product idea/approach : Folder based disk organization - projects-and-solutions

Sweet..I bought myself a 1TB portable harddrives this week. Don't you just love how much data you could store on one of these disks? The fact that I could store my bluray rips on to my portable harddisk and that my lg lcd tv can do HD rips right from the drive - that's amazing practicality right there! However, life it seems, is never so simple. I have 100s of movies unorganized in one huge folder, which is exactly what I needed to annoy myself while browsing the same on my tv to play a single movie. That got me thinking...
What if I had an automated way to organize movies into folders such that my folder-browsing-on-a-lcd-tv-or-a-comp would make my life a little easy?
I started thinking about this... I browsed a little in this context and I realized that if only I could "tag my movies somehow and create folders on-the-fly based on tags using hardlinks", I would have addressed my problem. I googled a bit to find software that works in the above fashion, only to find none.
A few more days of serious thought (as you know by now.. I think a lot.. and I guess this question is starting to sound like a blog rant/post of sorts...), in the interest of humanity, I thought I should come up with a generic way to address this: What if someone wanted to organize photos... organize music.. organize software?!
Turned my grey cells off for a while and here is an approach I came up with to solving my what-if scenario.
Tag / Group tag individual files (rely on a slick GUI to do it fast and do it good) - Adobe Flex/Eclipse RCP to do this?
Create hardlinks to each of the tagged files.
The first point is self-explanatory. The second (coz I am talking windows here), refers to making use of mklink.exe.
Consider a scenario where I have 2 movie files: I have a movie file "Transformers.avi" tagged as "english, action, bluray, sci-fi, imdb-top-50, must-watch-with-kids" and another movie file "The Specialist.avi" tagged as "english, bluray, thriller, adult". Here are a few of the possible locations I want to see my Transformers to be found:
[root directory]->all-tags->english
[root directory]->all-tags->bluray
[root directory]->all-tags->english->all-tags->bluray
[root directory]->all-tags->bluray->all-tags->action
[root direcotry]->all-tags->english->all-tags->action->bluray->all-tags->imdb-top-50
Given that windows has a limit of 1024 hardlinks to a single file, I probably would be allowed 7 unique tags per file. Each sub-folder will have an "all-tags" folder. Having it named "all-tags" makes it more accessible when order by name.
I believe this approach when automated to let you configure tags you want and where the hardlinks are created for you, helps you organize stuff effectively.
I don't know if there are better things out there. I would like your inputs on this approach and other possible ideas. I would like to gather inputs here and release something to sourceforge for everyone to use in a couple of weeks. I am sure, I can count on your positive response as always.

I believe hardlinks are not a good approach. Reason? A standalone player won't play them, and I wouldn't like a program who's made for tagging to tell me to stop making so many tags because of a Windows limitation on hardlinks (remembering each tag will increment the number of links exponentially).
Plus, "help" is not a good tag.
And I've had an idea once that I'm still planning to make some day to sort my own files - put the files in a big storage each below a GUID foldername (filename untouched) and store metadata in a sqlite database to be used by a smart file browser.

I was considering doing something similar to this with music for detecting duplicate songs and auto-organize funcationality.
For your application, I wouldn't recommend using any shell programs through Java. Exception handling becomes difficult, and your application becomes bound by the shell interface and implementation (i.e. windows versions or installations affect your application behavior).
I would use a database with a few tables: Files, Tags, and an association table.
The Files table would list the physical location of each file, the filename, and a unique identifier. This way, you can maintain information about each file without having to modify it for every tag association.
The Tags table would list each tag, and any metadata you want to store for each tag.
A third table, maybe 'FileTags' would store the assocation between tags and files. When adding tags to the stack, you would add a statement to the WHERE clause, and the list of files with all of the tags would be returned. This structure would also allow open your codebase up to other designs, such as include/exclude (autocomplete with X buttons), or possibly search.
If implemented in Java, your app would be platform independent, and would allow a very large number of tags and files. You can then use the system default application for opening the media file, and the user can make the selection in their native OS.

Reiser4?
...
(I mean nevermind Hans, but the tech...)
[disclaimer: Not a hacker. I know nothing of programming/coding, never mind filesystems & databases. I can barely code decent HTML even, if at all. Hey y'all! :D]
[footnote: does plain HTML5 work here? Too lazy to close my tags hehe :p]

Related

Is It Possible To Set An Ics/iCal File So That The File Name Can't Be Modified? Or Even to Read Only?

This may be a foolish question but I would appreciate any pointers: I'm generating year-long .Ics files that contain unique information people are actually purchasing - Moon phases, tides, etc.
The files work fine but I would like to try and 'lock' them so that the usual suspects cannot simply, download,rename and distribute the unique content to their advantage.
Does anyone know if anything like this exists? I've tried locking the file as text and but it doesn't stick once it's resaved as ics.

How to upload files and attachments to the sobject record using REST API?

Salesforce has two different UIs and in accordance with it, it has the possibility to store attached files differently.
Two files were uploaded via the classic UI and they are marked as 'attachments'. Other files were uploaded through the new UI and they are marked as 'files'.
I want to upload all of these files using REST API. I cannot find the proper documentation. Can somebody help me with this?
That's not 100% true. In SF Classic UI you were able to upload Files too. It's "just" about knowing the right API name of the table and you'll find lots of examples online.
Attachment and Document objects have exactly same API names, you can view their definitions in SOAP API definition or in REST API explorer (there was something which you can still see in screenshot in here, seems to be down now, maybe they're moving it to another area in documentation...)
The Files (incl. "Chatter Files") are stored in ContentDocument and ContentVersion object. The name is unexpected because long time ago SF purchased another company's product and it was called "Salesforce Content". In beginning it was bit of mess, now it's better integrated into whole platform but still some things lurk like File folders can be called Libraries sometimes in documentation but actual API name is ContentWorkspace. The entity relationship diagram can help a bit: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api.meta/api/sforce_api_erd_content.htm
ContentDocument is a header to which many places in SF link (imagine file wasting space on disk only once but being cross-linked from multiple records). It can have at least 1 version and if you need to update the document - you'd upload new version but all links in org wouldn't change, they'd still link to header.
So, how to use it?
REST API guide: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_rest.meta/api_rest/dome_sobject_insert_update_blob.htm
or maybe Chatter API guide (you tagged it with chatter so chances are you already use it): https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.chatterapi.meta/chatterapi/connect_resources_files.htm
some of my answers here might help (shameless plug). They're about upload and reading data too and one is even about data loader... but you might experiment with exporting files first, get familiar with structure before you load?
https://stackoverflow.com/a/48668673/313628
https://stackoverflow.com/a/56268939/313628
https://stackoverflow.com/a/60284736/313628

Full text search in iOS application bundle files

How would I go about doing a full text search across a bunch of html files in an iOS application bundle? I need to have a lot of web content available offline and I need to be able to do a full text search across all of it. I feel like storing that content in a database will get a little bulky and slow things down significantly.
Thoughts?
--
Thanks,
Brandon
Do keep in mind that, even though it's a mobile device, the iPhone does have a fairly fast processor. All you're doing [said tongue-in-cheek] is searching text. These devices are built for video, music, and images.
In order of increasing amounts of coding on your part, you can:
Use a 3rd-party library (the only one I found is Locayta)
Port a non-Objective C search library (such as Lucene)
Store your HTML files in a database, and do a SQL search for any search text. Without a bunch of extra coding, this will really only work easily with exact matching on a single search term.
Manually load each file into the app and search the text using NSString's rangeOfString. Add features at will.
Build your own search engine, built off (at least) an index of terms. Start by trimming stop words, stem if you feel the need, decide if you want document relevance or not and possibly pursue vector space algorithms. Adding in autocorrect is probably beyond your app's focus, but nonetheless building your own text search engine would be a fast (run-time) way of providing multi-word search and a big bullet on your resume.

Storing Huge Amount of Files in the Application Bundle

Um, I working on a dictionary app and currently trying to add narration for each article. I have about 97000 AAC-files. They are tiny - about 3-5 kilobytes each, but there are so many of them! I don't need SQL DB for access management because filenames are identical to the primary keys, so given the key I will be able to pick a proper sound file from disk and play it (I expect so).
The thing I worry about are issues related to huge number of files. I don't really want to mess up with CoreData.
Will there be any problems if I just add all these files to the application bundle? Will Xcode be angry at me? Will iOS be OK with that?
If not what should I use then? How to handle huge (~100'000) number of files properly?
There is no restriction on the number of files that can be added to your application bundle.
It would be better for you if you can put the files on a folder(say audio) in the app bundle.

Own data format for the iPhone

I would like to create my own data format for an iPhone app. The files should be similar structured as e.g. Apple's iWork files (.pages). That means, I have a folder with some files in it:
The file 'Juicy.fruit' contains:
Fruits
---> Apple.xml
---> Banana.xml
---> Pear.xml
---> PreviewPicture.png
This folder "Fruits" should be packed in a handy file 'Juicy.fruit'. Compression isn't necessary. How could I achieve this? I've discovered some open source ZIP-libraries. However, I would like to to build my own data format with the iPhones built-in libs (if possible).
Best regards,
Stefan
Okay, so there are three ways I am reading your question, here's my best guess on each one:
You want your .fruit files to be associated with your app via Safari/SMS/some network connection (aka when someone wants to download files made for your app or made by your app).
In this case, you can register a protocol for your app, as discussed here:
iPhone file extension app association
You want the iPhone to globally associate .fruit files with your app, in which case you want to look into Uniform Type Identifiers. Basically, you set up this association in your installer's info.plst file.
You want to know how you can go from having a folder with files in it to that folder being a single file (package) with your .fruit extension.
If that's the case, there are many options out there and I don't see a purpose in rolling your own. Both Microsoft and Adobe simply use a standard zip compression method and use their own extension (instead of .zip). If you drop any office 2007 document, such as docx or Adobe's experimental .pdfxml file into an archive utility (I like 7z, but any descent one will do), you will get a folder with several xml files, just like you're describing for your situation. (This is also how Java's jar file type works, fyi). So unless you have a great reason to avoid standard compression methods (I vote gzip), I would follow the industry lead on this one.
I can definitly appreciate the urge to go DIY at every level possible, but you're basically asking (if it's #3) how you can create your own packaging algorithm, and after reading how some of the most basic compression methods work, I would leave that one alone. Plus I really doubt that Apple has built in libraries for doing something that most people will just use standard methods for.
One last note:
If you are really gunning to do it from scratch (still suggest not), since your files are all XML, you could just create a new XML file that will act as a wrapper of sorts, and have each file go into that wrapper file. But this would be really redundant when it came time to unwrap, as it would have to load the whole file every time. But it would be something like:
Juicy.fruit --
<fruit-wrapper>
<fruit>
<apple>
... content from apple.xml
</apple>
</fruit>
<fruit>
<banana>
... content from banana.xml
</banana>
</fruit>
<fruit>
<pear>
... content from pear.xml
</pear>
</fruit>
<picture>
...URL-encoded binary of preview picture
</picture>
</fruit-wrapper>
But with this idea, you either have to choose to unpack it, and thus risk losing track of the files, overwriting some but not all, etc etc, or you always treat it like one big file, in which case, unlike with archives, you have to load all of the data each time to pull anything out, instead of just pulling the file you want from the archive.
But it could work, if you're determined.
Also, if you are interested, there is a transfer protocol intended specifically for XML over mobile called WBXML (Wap Binary XML). Not sure if it is still taken seriously, but if there is an iPhone library for it, you should research it.