Abstract "Connection method" and add menu item for "Manage Connections"

Features wanted...
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Stilez
Posts: 107
Joined: 23 Aug 2010 14:32

Abstract "Connection method" and add menu item for "Manage Connections"

Post by Stilez »

I've noticed "wishes" which all come down to "Can XYplorer be made to handle X device?", for devices that are essentially a file system which would fit right into XYPlorer, but needs some specific handler or connection to do so. This constantly comes up and given how new devices emerge on the market will probably contiunue to come up. Hence this wishlist/idea.

Examples of non-fixed devices that fit this idea include ADB, SCP, FTP, virtual drives such as VDK/VMDK, portable devices without drive letters, and disk images created by selected popular disk imaging/backup software. (Of course some of these examples are already in XYPlorer and some have been discussed).

I'd like to ask/suggest that maybe XYPlorer could abstract the idea of a "file system connection" (a bit like how ODBC abstracts the idea of a database connection?). So someone who wants to, can write and make available an API-level plugin to handle basic command-sets/primitives for a particular connection type that isn't yet supported, until such time as you yourself want to do so. There can't be that many primitives needed to do this for a given system, and they are well defined because portable devices, SCP, and others already have examples of primitives that one could look at to decide upon a suitable standard set of primitives for this.

The result would be that it would be possible to define a new connection such as "ADB/SCP to a given IP address", or "Virtual disk at a given path", and that type of connection could be used in XYPlorer, and also one could leverage the entire XYPLorer feature set such as thumbnails, tags, searches, and so on, with that file system.

I'd like to give two extreme examples of how this could be leveraged beyond standard fixed devices, someone would be able to write an XYPlorer add-on for disk recovery, that takes as a target, an unformatted (possible corrupted) raw hard drive or hard drive partition, and handles the back-end disk map and sector search, and which presents it to XYPlorer as a read-only normal volume, so that files can possibly be found and recovered using XYPlorer's full capabilities (rich copy, search, thumbnails, tags, tag search). Another extreme application might be to access data file structures that aren't available as a disk volume, but are accessible via some system or web API call, and present the resulting data as if it is a normal tree structure of files instead, again allowing easy search, tag, thumbnail, rich copy, and other functions.

It would also provide a much easier way to simplify adding new types of device/connection which may exist in future, and to get them added faster (if some users wish it) or to cater to people who want to access features that might be popular but not yet important enough to take your own development time, such as SCP/ADB, and to provide a plugin system to handle those.

It would also be one heck of a useful feature generally.

What do you think? :)

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