On Apr 23, 2008, at 2:07 AM, Jens Alfke wrote:
On 22 Apr '08, at 10:21 PM, Daniel DeCovnick wrote:
Through a lot of thought experiments, I've come to the conclusion
that the best place to save this sort of thing would be in the
resource fork of the file being opened, but I could be totally off
the mark there, and it's certainly an unorthodox thing to do.
It would have been the right thing to do ten years ago. But these
days resource forks are definitely a legacy feature and it would be
a bad idea to write new software that relies on them.
Have you looked at Extended Attributes? They're kind of the moral
equivalent of resources, but they're newer, lighter-weight and
better integrated into the filesystem. I don't know if there's any
in-depth documentation, but you can start by reading the man pages
for getxattr, setxattr, et al.
Thanks for the suggestion. I've just looked through them now, as well
as at the OSXBook (Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach by Amit
Singh) info on that. In theory it looks good, but it's somewhat
confusing. It looks like, at least in 10.4, except for the resource
fork which is mapped as a fake xattr, you can only have inline
attributes, with a length limit of 3802 bytes, and it would be quite
common for my data to be significantly larger than that. Does anyone
know if that's changed for 10.5?
Option 3. Add my own Metadata key and put an XML or similarly
textual version of my graphical rep as the string. I have no idea
whether or not this is possible. It seems like a bad abuse of the
metadata system in any case.
This seems reasonable. It's the same way that the Finder stores
comments, which is analogous to what you're doing.
I dunno... it just seems that there's nowhere that the metadata system
isn't integrated with Spotlight, and here, it wouldn't be. Seems to
violate the spirit a bit. Still, it probably meets all the requirements.
Thanks for the suggestions,
Dan
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