[Sugar-devel] Adding support for new datastore to the XS...

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 12:13, Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 11:36 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> Is it clearer now?
>
> yes - thanks!
>
>>> And while we're at it - is 'preview' completely gone?
>>
>> Check out that page, preview is a metadata property like the others.
>
> So metadata stores binary files too? I thought it was meant to hold
> straight utf-8 text (or json formatted), but not binary formats. If it
> can store binary formats, it's a good idea to spell that out... and
> which formats to expect too! The trick of the 'metadata' is that it's
> readable by general tools (the journal, moodle) that don't know
> specialised formats...
>
> Or is 'preview' a text file with a filename of the actual preview file?

No, property files hold strings of bytes. There are a few standard
properties which should have a specified format that were kindly
documented by Bert here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Low-level_Activity_API#Meta_Data

But anyway, as no type checks are performed by the DS, users of
metadata cannot assume a property's data will have one format or the
other and should take the needed precautions.

Regards,

Tomeu

> cheers,
>
>
>
> m
> --
>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
>