On Jun 03, 2006, at 10:29 PM, jeb eddy wrote:
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
That will depend on how the kids access the servers
If they have to log in that may simply mount their folder on the
server on the Mac as a networked volume.
And, on the Mac, from there all volumes are more or less equally
accessible. Whether it's a network share, an external HD or any other
kind really wont affect WHAT you need to do.
But it may impact HOW you do what you do.
IF your program has to mount the share for the students then you will
need to handle a host of issues associated with that.
I'd say you have a good list of questions for the I folks at the
school about how their network works, what the students will and
won't need to do to save their stuff to the server, etc.
Start with ascertaining how the students should connect to the
server, whether your program should do this automatically and go from
there. I'm sure you'll come up with several more.
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