Attaching files to a document like a file system

[Bill Vlahos]

Good question.

A number of users have asked for the ability to store documents in InfoWallet. These could be anything from pictures or medical image scans to Word or PDF documents for Power of Attorney, Wills, Contracts, etc. The requests have been to have them together with their other information in their "wallet" and to have them encrypted.

I was thinking that I could simply store them in custom properties in their existing data file (i.e. Wallet file). While that would work fine for a small number of documents it would become unwieldy with either many or very large documents. Long before they would reach the 4 GB limit for a stack file (InfoWallet stores its data in a stack file) saving the entire file would take much too long on a USB attached flash drive.

Instead of doing that I was thinking of either cloning a small stack for each document and compressing, encrypting, and adding the document to the custom property of that stack or even more directly just compressing and encrypting the document at the file system in a folder. Either of these would work cross platform. While it wouldn't be a big deal to have the user "import" the document and I process it, exporting or viewing the document would be a multi-step process 1) Decrypt, uncompress, and export the file to the disk, 2) opening the file. This would be additional steps and would leave the unprotected file on the file system.

Perhaps there is a way to do this transparently directly from the program without saving a copy to the disk but I can't think of it. Opening a document that comes via email or web download appears to do this but in actuality they download and store a copy of the actual document somewhere on disk and then open it.

Encrypt-stick software (https://www.encrypt-stick.com/) creates "disk image" type vaults that behave like a password protected, encrypted disk and I thought that was kind of cool but I can't figure out how to do that in Rev. You can create this kind of thing on the Mac with Disk Tools creating an encrypted and password protected disk image but it won't work on Windows or Linux. Since they create a disk-like storage system other programs can open or save directly to it or the user can copy to or from it.

I don't need that level of functionality but it would be good to make the viewing and/or exporting to disk of a stored document a one-step clickable process that doesn't expose the file to the file system.

Bill Vlahos


On Jan 4, 2010, at 8:51 AM, Bernard Devlin wrote:

> Bill, are you asking that your app InfoWallet should use it's
> open/save dialogs to look into some stack/datastore to open/save the
> file? If so, then I believe that is possible, but maybe not with Rev
> as it currently works.  It would require that the Rev file IO code
> should be able to hook into some kind of Virtual File System e.g. a
> custom property set of a stack, or maybe even a relational database.
> 
> If your asking that other apps should be able to open/save documents
> to InfoWallet, then I think that maybe be very difficult.  The only
> way I can think for you to do that is to look at impliment something
> like a webdav/ftp server within your app.  But even if that works, it
> would require mappying the OS filesystem such that the filesystem was
> talking to your in-built server.
> 
> Bernard
> 
> On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 12:04 AM, Bill Vlahos <bvlahos at mac.com> wrote:
>> I want to add the ability to store documents encrypted in InfoWallet. I can figure out how to simply add them either to a custom property or just encrypt on disk. It would be great to be able to treat the storage like a disk instead of attached files that can be imported and exported where you can open-from and save-to them and copy to and from it.
>> 
>> Apple's Disk Tools can create these types of disk images that can be encrypted but they only work on the Mac.
>> 
>> Any ideas on how this can be done in Rev that works cross platform?
>> 
>> 
>> Bill Vlahos
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