In my experience on PC's in school networks, I would determine the path to the server on installation, write that to an initialization file. When the application starts up, it reads the initialization file, and reads in the path to the data on the server.
You can test this on your hard drive by having it read in the path to your data folder on your drive. You will have to pay attention to the different ways Macs and PC's show their file hierarchy. Dan Chapman -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of jeb eddy Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2006 8:30 PM To: [email protected] Subject: navigating within a school network Dear NUG, When I talk fairly soon with the technology lab manager at an elementary school, I would like to appear less totally dumb than I really am on the subject of networks. She has a mix of Macs and PCs. My application is currently just a stand-alone -- it lets the user save files on the local hard drive of the computer she/he is using. In our previous short chat, this teacher has told me she would prefer to have kids save their files to the folders that have been set up for them on a central server, which kids can access from whatever classroom they roam to. So I think what I need to do in RB is find how to access that server, and then travel down some unknown number of levels until I find the student's home folder. I know I can count the mounted volumes on any local computer, via the VolumeCount method. But now my ignorance flares forth. (I'm coding at home, where I do not have anything other than external hard drives to test with.) Will/should a school network server probably or certainly appear as a mounted volume if I do VolumeCount, and list the names in a listbox? This requires that the server and the kid's computer's hard drive be "peers," right? If the administrator provides me with the name for that peer volume, it would be true that I can use it as the starting point, then use the usual ".child()" method, one or more times, to reach my destination. No problem. But what if my app on the kid's computer can for some reason not see the target server, like maybe I need to climb UP a hierarchy? Hmm, I just discovered (for the first time, I think) that a folderitem object has a "parent" property. (Has it been there a long time, and I have just not noticed?) Can I define a folderItem, make it equal to a mounted volume, ask for ITS parent, test for nil, and then if not nil, climb, repeat, etc? Given the names of all parents, I can climb until I reach the level of the server, or a parent of the server, and go across and down, right? I'm sure the lab manager will give me some info (e.g., server names) about her network setup; she wants my program to be used by the kids. But I've got to do the RB coding. And it must be cross-platform. Am I on the right track with this "parent" method? Are there some other essential RB methods I will need? Can anyone point me to some reading I can do? Finally, what about permissions? Computer security is big in schools these days (in our town, some nosey newspaper reporters got in a car with a wireless laptop a couple of years ago, drove into the school district headquarters parking lot, and discovered that they could get in to the district systems, like student grades and teacher evaluations and salaries. The school board has been freaked out ever since.) Am I likely to need a password and/or some kind of permission at every stage of this navigation process? If these questions are too specific for general NUG interest, I would love to hear directly from people who work with schools. Your customers may be interested in seeing my app. Many thanks, Jeb Eddy _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html> _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
