File System metadata

[Mark Thornton]

Alan Bateman wrote:
> when running on those file systems. The other approach, which isn't 
> incompatible with the first approach, is to provide generic or 
> reflective access. At one point we had a prototype file attribute view 
> that did exactly that. Okay for simple types but messy for anything 
> more complicated. All I can say is that I will check with the group 
> about re-visiting this topic but I'm prettry sure we don't want to 
> re-invent JNDI :-)
>
I wrote a JNDI provider that allowed access to most Windows 
file/directory attributes. While it had the advantage that (almost) 
everything was possible, the price was that nothing was simple.

The NTFS compressed attribute and compressed size information is 
commonly used by file browsers and also file open/save dialogs. You 
can't do a faithful emulation of the Windows open/save dialog without 
access to the compressed atribute (on my system compressed 
directories/files are shown in blue). This would be relevant to the 
Windows L&F implementation of JFileChooser.

Mark Thornton