I was wondering if there was someway to find the file path of a contacts image?
I'm familiar with the functions ABPersonCopyImageData and ABPersonCopyImageDataWithFormat.
Those don't return the actual path to the image though. I was wondering if this was even possible? Thanks!
It's probably not possible. Even if it were possible, it wouldn't matter, because your application only has access to the files in its own application sandbox. The address book is stored outside of your application's sandbox. So even if you had the path you couldn't access the file.
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I want the user to upload his picture when he registers his information.
The thing is when the user uploads his image.. should automatically create a folder with his ID to be like this wwwroot/images/UserID/fadi.jpg
Basically: you really shouldn't. The wwwroot is for static assets used by the application. You're using server-side, so in theory it might be possible but that's not what the folder is meant for. An alternative method like AWS would be preferred, but if you can't do that (either because of payment requirements or other complications) I would suggest saving the image to your database. One way to do this would be to base64 encode the image and save it that way. I'm not going to give an example of that here, there are plenty available elsewhere. One such example is this.
I have image upload in my system. I am struggling to understand what is the logic of serving images.
If I upload directly to wwwroot, the files will be accessible to everyone, which is not what I want.
I understand I could save the file contents in the database as base64 but those can be big files, and I would like them on the server in files.
I could convert them on the fly when requested. Most probably getting the path to file, then loading it in a memory stream and spitting out the base64. But seems overkill, and not an elegant solution. I use Automapper for most data and I have to write some crazy custom mappers, which I will If there is no other way.
I could create virtual path, which from what I understand maps physical path on server to a url which doesn't seem any different than option 1
I fancy there is a way to spit out a link/url that this user has access to (or at least logged users) that can be passed to the app so it can load it. Is this impossible or unreasonable? Or am I missing something?
What is the correct way of doing in general?
Also, what is a quick way to do it without spending days for setup?
To protect the specific static files, you can try the solutions explained in this official doc.
Solution A: Store static files you want to authorize outside of wwwroot, and call UseStaticFiles to specify a path and other StaticFileOptions after calling UseAuthorization, then set the fallback authorization policy.
Solution B: Store static files you want to authorize outside of wwwroot, and serve it via a controller action method to which authorization is applied and return a FileResult object.
I am creating a button that will open one directory in your computer (for example: C:\Users\NameOfUser\Downloads) when you click it. But if I do this on another computer or from another user account with a different name the button doesn’t work. I just used Process.Start() for the button.
Is there a different way to do this that will work from any user account?
You can get most folder paths like this just by calling Environment.GetFolderPath() with the right Environment.SpecialFolder enum value. Unfortunately, the Downloads special folder in .Net isn't quite "special" enough and (imo) is unreasonably complicated to get. If you actually need to know the path, the correct way is to follow the accepted answer here:
Getting Downloads Folder in C#?
Even worse, it's written for C# and uses code that's not very easy to translate.
The good news is there's also a NuGet package I'd expect you can use from VB. The even better news is you don't really care about the exact path in this case. You just want to open an Explorer window via Process.Start(). That means you can use this shortcut (also available via the other question):
Process.Start("shell:Downloads")
I'm a bit confused about where the application should send a bunch of files. Let me suppose that an application accepts a number of images with NSOpenPanel at a time from the user. The application applies graphic filters to them. And it's now ready to save processed files. Before they forced us to sandbox applications, we were allowed to export processed files to application folder in Application Support without NSSavePanel. If you wanted to save files elsewhere, then you had to use NSSavePanel. If the application is sandboxed, it cannot send files to NSApplicationSupportDirectory/{app name}(which points to the containers folder assigned to this application)? My first sandboxed application was rejected a few days ago merely because a text field showed a path to container's application support folder. So if you have a bunch of files to export, you have to prompt the user to ask where to save each file? AppSandboxDesignedGuide, which Apple, Inc. has issued, has nothing to say exactly about where to save files except that it says "Your app has unrestricted read/write access to the container and its subdirectories." I think this PDF guide is a printed version of this web site. I'm asking this question here because I have some doubts and reviewers were often wrong at least when I submitted applications to them two years ago.
Thank you for your advice.
If the files are only for the application itself to use you can save the files in "Application Support/", which under the sandbox is under your container, just as before - just use the APIs to construct the path to that folder (and create it, it doesn't exist automatically, just as before).
If you are outputting files for the user to access then you don't put them in the container - that folder is meant to be hidden from ordinary users, though yours is the first time I've heard that even showing the path got you a rejection, but Apple are pretty random.
Here are three choices of where to put your files:
First is to ask the user. This is what you would normally do anyway, you shouldn't just dump files somewhere.
Second is a situation that the sandbox makes harder - when where the file should is is implicit, e.g. a graphic conversion program might sensibly output the converted file with the same name but different extension in the same folder as the original. This was finally addressed by Apple around 10.8.3 or something with "Related Items" - Apple's docs for this are here. Essentially in the Document Types in the Info.plist you must list all the extensions you handle - both in and out - and add a NSIsRelatedItemType key with the value of YES to all those you might convert between. E.g. For TextEdit .rtf, .rtfd and .txt are flagged in this way so TextEdit can open as one format and save as another.
Third, if you wish to put all your files in one location, say in a "Converted Items" folder. Then you ask the user once to specify this folder and then save a security-scoped bookmark to that folder in your applications defaults or elsewhere in your app's container. On subsequent executions you can access this bookmark and regain access to the folder. For an introduction to this start with Apple's Security-Scoped Bookmarks and Persistent Resource Access. This is really no harder than pre-sandbox as any decent app would always ask for the location of the folder from the user, the difference is the need to save the security-scoped bookmark so the user doesn't need to give permission every time.
HTH.
I'm new in Cocoa. My app is getting information from server, and displaying UNC paths of shared folders. I want to be able to store information of my Absoulte paths for each folder, so later I can display them in my APP. With more details
UNC Path - //CompName/sharedFolder
Absoulte Path -/Users/user/desktop/SharedFolder
So I need to store somewhere all that ABsolute paths locally on computer, after I can browse UNC paths from server, and display their Absoule paths.
What is the best way to store information? I know it is possible to use Core DAta. But I haven't designed for that my App. Can I store infromation in hiden file, and read it from there? How can I do it?
Thanks a lot.
It looks like you are looking for the NSUserDefaults class. From the documentation:
The NSUserDefaults class provides a programmatic interface for interacting with the defaults system. The defaults system allows an application to customize its behavior to match a user’s preferences. For example, you can allow users to determine what units of measurement your application displays or how often documents are automatically saved. Applications record such preferences by assigning values to a set of parameters in a user’s defaults database. The parameters are referred to as defaults since they’re commonly used to determine an application’s default state at startup or the way it acts by default.
You just tell it what data you want to store.