Re: file sequences and plugins

[Ricardo Veguilla <veguilla hpcf upr edu>]

On Fri, 2004-09-03 at 16:32 +0100, Simon Wistow wrote:

> I work at a film company and, at present, we have our own, crack fuelled 
> and nasty file browser started years before I got here and I'm looking 
> into replacing it with Nautilus.
> 
> We have two fairly specific requirements however. We deal with 
> directories full of frames - anywhere between a few hundred and a few 
> thousand but, most of the time, these are in sequence and we treat them 
> as single object.
> 

> My basic plan was to write a vfs layer that would fake presenting the 
> files as a single object with a faked mime type so that we could write 
> scripts that deal with them.
> 
> The other thing I'd like to do is the ability to right click on a
> directory and have that set as the current scen (and/or shot and/or
> job). I had vague naughty thoughts about faking up a mime-type using the
> VFS layer but I'm not sure that would work - is there any clean way of
> adding options to the context menu dependent on path withotu forking the
> code base?
> 
> Nice to haves would include having a detailed file information panel 
> (with possible lookups into our shot tracking DB) which I presume that I 
> can just do with a side-bar. Also the ability for people to store app 
> shortcuts on the browser but again I presume I can do that as a side 
> panel if somebody hasn't already done it.
> 

I'm not a nautilus developer, but, hopefully, someone with more
knowledge will correct any misinformation on my part.

You can add items to the context menu by writing a nautilus-extension. I
couldn't find any tutorial/example/howto but I guess you could use the
nautilus-open-terminal as an example.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2004-May/msg00022.html

For writing a vfs module, you can check the following tutorial:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-gnvfs/

You could also write an nautilus-view component, so you'll be able to
switch easily from traditional file views to the "frame-sequence" view. 

Good luck.

-- 
Ricardo Veguilla <veguilla hpcf upr edu>