filename path over local network

[Bob Sneidar]

I think then that for streaming videos, you need a setup card where you can configure the path to the movie files. When your app starts up, you will need to mount that volume if it is not local. There are shell commands for Windows to do that, as well as *NIX based systems. I do not think that LC has a command or function for mounting shares, but I could be wrong. Applescript can also be used for OS X. For Windows however, you can use this syntax for creating a mapped drive letter in the shell: NET USE G: \\<server>\<path> /YES The /YES switch means persistence, meaning next time the user logs in it will try to remount the share. I wouldn't worry about user names and passwords. It's up to the local admin to make sure that the user has access to the resources. 

Anyway, based on your result from mounting the share, you can inform your user when a mount point fails, and either quit the app or else inform the user that streaming videos are not available until the share is mounted. You can have a button on your setup page which attempts to mount the share where the videos are. 

That would be my approach I think. On Mac OS X server using AFP browsing to an image file in the properties palette worked for me. The path was relative however, meaning it looked something like /./../../Volumes etc. As I said I tried the URL in the form afp://<mount point>/<path to file> and that made LC lockup. I had to force quit at that point. I think an absolute path like /Volumes/<mount point/<path to file> might work, but I didn't try it. For Windows you would either reference a mapped drive and then use a full path, or else you could use the backslash notation \\<server>\<mount point>\<path to file>. That would mean that each app instance would store the path to the video files locally, not have it be some universal setting in a database somewhere. 

I hesitate to say this because it complicates things, but what some software developers do is they install an app on a server, and then when users launch the app from the server, the first time it installs the local app and other resources it needs to run. This allows them to have a config file on the server that can be read telling the client apps where to find all the resources. It also allows the auto install of updates, by checking to see if the local version is the current version. It's just another way of going about it. 

Bob


On Apr 26, 2012, at 4:36 PM, Nicolas Cueto wrote:

> Thanks for responding, Bob.
> 
>> If I understand you correctly, you want to connect to reference an image
>> file on a server.
> 
> Yes.
> 
>> I think this is a bad idea, but if your os has the share
>> mounted, just browse to the file and choose it.
> 
> I think I already tried this, ie, by browsing to the jpg file within
> the LC IDE using the property inspector for the image object. No luck.
> But I can use the IDE's "File > Image import" to browse and import the
> jpg from the server.
> 
> Anyway, your next point seemed to have more potential, i.e.,
> 
>> It's better if you have a project folder and you either put your images in
>> that or inside an images folder inside the project folder (that's the method
>> I prefer).
> 
> And where would that project folder be located? on my computer? on the
> server? Dumb question it seems, but...
> 
> If you mean "on my computer", that's my current setup. The problem is,
> the stack's gonna be a standalone running on the 30+ computers at the
> computer-lab of another school. And, rather than accessing JPGs, it's
> 5-40Mb MPG videos, which videos my standalone, as it currently is
> setup, downloads from my webhost account to a local folder. So, I was
> thinking that, rather than overload my onrev account, I could
> re-configure my stack/standalone so that the videos could be retrieved
> (or streamed?) from that computer-lab's server. That way, I could
> package the videos into one large zipped file, and the
> standalone/installer in a separate much smaller zipped file for
> download.
> 
> Off to classes.
> --
> Nicolas Cueto
> 
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