Before I look into this any further I just wondered if it's possible within VB.net to check if DropBox has synced?
Basically the program I have written uses DropBox to synchronize jobs to a Main computer which then ultimately process the zip file and deletes it. Once the job is processed a text file is re synced and the person who originally sent the job gets feedback as to its progress. All this works great. However, I would like to give an indication within the program itself so some of the less computer literate can see that DropBox has synced and they can safely turn off there laptops and head off home.
Has anybody any experience of this?
You could use the Dropbox API to do the upload/download instead, at which point you'd know exactly when things had happened.
See https://www.dropbox.com/developers for information about the API.
Related
Background
I use xlwings within Excel, I just had this message popping out stating that Xlwings was unable to find the location of my OneDrive; I followed the steps as stated on their troubleshooting section and was able to solve it partially.I realized that OneDrive needs to be unpaused (this mean synced) to be able to solve it
Problem
Is there a way to address this without OneDrive needed to be in sync? I create a lot of "temp" files for some middle-processes and I would like to sync the final result, not those that just get created and deleted afterwards. It is not an algorithm design/flaw, let us say for example I download temp files from the internet, then transform them/append them to a master file and lastly delete them (they only serve to get the data). For this matter I hit the "Pause Sync" temporarly until the process is done, but it seems XlWings pops out the message if OneDrive is paused.
I was wanting to use a file sharing server to keep certain files up-to-date and constant across multiple instances of my application across multiple computers - like (for example) writing a multiplayer game, which stores all the player's positions in a text file, and uses something like Dropbox to keep the text file constant across all the applications, and each application instance can change the file with that application's player's position, and then the rest of the applications can update accordingly. This is only an example, and is not what I intend to do using this technology. What I want to do does not rely on fast sharing of data very quickly - but only periodically downloading and updating the text file.
I was wondering how I might be able to do this using the Dropbox API for Objective-C without prompting the user for any Dropbox username/password - just store a single Dropbox account's login information, log into it automatically and update/download the file stored on it?
From what I have found out from experimenting, Dropbox prompts users for their passwords via a web-broswer, and is designed to accommodate multiple accounts, whereas I only need to accommodate the 'Server' account.
So, is there anyway to do this sort of thing using the Dropbox API, or should I use something else. Or do I need to find out how to write my own server. Using some sort of file sharing API seems a lot easier to me than writing an actual server.
Thanks for any help,
Ben
You might think about using Google App Engine (GAE). I had a similar requirement recently and I'm thinking this is a good option when you want centralized data. Plus you can do the no-browser account login by using your own custom authentication, or I think it's even possible via OAuth? Depends on how sensitive the data is I guess. I just rolled my own.
From my research I found that using Dropbox as a server has some issues with scalability, since you'll be limited to maybe 5,000 calls per day. source It's built on Amazon S3, so you could also look at using that directly.
GAE lifts that limit up to 675,000, but can be increased up to 91 million for free.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas
I did find an open-source project for doing this with Java, alternative you could look at Python example
I've written a daemon that continuously checks for updated files and syncs them. I wrote it for my own file manager iOS app. You can find the implementation here:
https://github.com/H2CO3/MyFile/tree/master/DropboxDaemon
I'm personally not an iOS developer but I came across this question while looking for something else and thought I would offer up another potential solution to the OP's question.
Microsoft just released something called Azure Mobile Services which supports iOS development (among other platforms). It's basically a convenient way to set up a back end system complete with push notifications, authentication, etc. without rolling your own. You don't need to know anything about Azure or servers as the setup process walks you through most of it. It is new so keep that in mind, but it looks promising for situations like this.
Here's a 10 minute video explaining how to use it with an iOS developed app along with links to more documentation:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/iOS-Support-in-Windows-Azure-Mobile-Services/
Hope this helps.
Is it possible to recreate a scenario like itunes match with iCloud APIs available to-date (i am writing/editing this in april 2012) .. specifically..I mean something like this>
A user creates a media document (audio or video) in my app...and it is automatically uploaded to (his) iCloud space. Then user decides to delete his local copy. But the app still shows the document in let say a table view...and if the user presses play..it begins to stream from iCloud..The user also is able to recreate (download) a local copy of the document. (Just to be sure, I understand the difference between the document I describe here and the concept of UIDocument).
If yes..how would I implement the transfer of the file ..let say a recording of 1 minute video..to the cloud? What folder would it be?
Apple docs state that there shouldnt be a distinction between where the data is stored. No sense of local copy of cloud copy. I think it is possible to do what you ask, but you're likely to get rejected. Use something like amazon AWS for hosting instead. You'd have more control over the files and unless you're going to have tons of users, you'll also qualify for the free tier.
It would be far to much for me to ask for a full solution. However, could you point me in the right direction in what I need to look up, learn etc as its the first time I am going to attempt something like this.
What I want to do, is in my Mac application, have a list of items which are files which I want to store online. Then from inside the application the user can download any of the items stored at that location online. If I add new items to download online I want the app to automatically add them to the list for download.
That make sense? Anyway, its the first time I have done anything like this using an online server and accessing it via an app, so any support would be hugely appreciated.
Sounds like you want an ftp type server, you can then get list of remote files, upload and download file, if you do search for Cocoa ftp I am sure you will find someone has written a nice wrapper class for ftp, there are even complete open source apps for ftp whose code you can examine, FileZilla, other you could just use NSTask, and call the ftp command line tool on all macs.
I have a particular file I want to monitor for file read attempts by all applications on OSX. I'd like to be able to interrupt the requests so I could decide which applications have permission to read the file and which don't (by querying the user, or checking a cache of user responses). Is this possible with the OSX API? If not, is it even possible to get a list of which applications or processes do read a file?
I'm not saying there's no way to do this, but what #Jonathan is talking about isn't it.
That API is for tracking the creation, change, and destruction of files. Notably this tool is used by things like Spotlight to watch activity on the filesystem for new, interesting files.
But, wisely, reading isn't one of the events it tracks.
And even if reading WAS tracked, it is still the wrong mechanism, as it's a notification system after the fact, not in line with the call itself.
I seriously doubt what you want is possible the way you describe it.
With Access Control Lists, you can limit access at the user level (Fred can read the file, but Bob can not). This is a setting on the file itself. But there's no mechanism to allow Bobs App1 to read a file, while Bobs App2 can not, since there's really no formal mechanism of "application identity" beyond the command to executed, or whatever the program "says" its name is (both of which can be spoofed if motivated enough).
However, feel free to crawl the Darwin sources -- no doubt the answer is buried in there somewhere near the open(2) call.
EDIT, regarding comment.
What are you trying to do? What's the overall context?
Another thing that you may want to try is to use FUSE.
FUSE is a utility that let's you have "user space filesystems". People use FUSE for many purposes, like reading NTFS volumes, or mounting remote system via SSH.
They have a simple example, that gives you a skeleton that you can fill in for your purposes.
For most of the use cases, you'll simple defer to the system. However, for OPEN you will add your logic. Then you could point your FUSE utility at a directory, and "mount it". Then all of the files below that directory can use your new behavior.
I'm still not sure how you will identify Apps by name, but if it's not a real "security" issue, just for local control, I imaging you can come up with something. Activity Monitor has apps names, so they must be available, and FUSE will be running within the process space (I think), rather than through some external mechanism.
All that said, I think FUSE is your best bet, but it's probably not appropriate if you want to do this to "any file" with no preparation by the user (like not installing FUSE). If you wanted to do "any file", your FUSE system would need to be mounted at root, and then you'll simply have a full "clone" of the filesystem, with those files from the normal root "unprotected", while those from your new FUSE root will be protected. So, if someone wanted to NOT use your FUSE system, the real file is readily available to them through the actual file location.
If not, is it even possible to get a list of which applications or processes do read a file?
The command-line tool fs_util allows you to monitor filesystem activity, including reading.
The writings of Amit Singh should come in very handy. He explored the API that provides FileSystem events a few years ago, and provided a sample tool that allows you to intercept FS events. It's open source!
If i remember his conclusion properly, their isn't an official API, but you can use apple's tools to achieve what you want.