Ultra Recall Virtual Disk

[bkonia]

The only problem with storing files within UR is that there's no way to reference another file stored within the UR database. You can launch an application from UR, but if that application uses files, those files would have to be stored in Windows, not within UR.

It would be really cool if there was a way to map a virtual disk to UR, so that you could actually load a file stored in UR, rather than in Windows.

For example, if you're using Dreamweaver, you have a directory on your hard drive that contains all the files for your website. I'd like to be able to store those files within UR, but without a way to access them from within Dreamweaver, that would be pointless.

However, if I could map a virtual drive, like "U" to Ulta Recall, then from within Dreamweaver, I could load the file using a syntax like:

U:\Some UR Folder\somefile.htm

You could have a new System parameter in UR called "Path" that would assign a Windows-like path name to an Info Item. Once that attribute has been assigned to an Info Item, you could access that Info Item and any of its children using that path name, from any Windows application.

In the above example, you would assign the Path attribute "Some UR Folder" to the root folder of your website. Then you could load any document underneath that root folder using the standard Windows path notation.

If this feature were implemented, then UR could literally replace the crappy Windows file system and there would be no reason to ever have to use Windows to store anything!

[HalfCyborg]

I think that is an outstanding idea.

[xja]

I also think this is a great idea... I remember a discussion about this a while back, and I think Kevin mentioned that it would be a rather large undertaking to write a virtual driver like that... I am sure it would be!

If it were to be done, I would suggest that perhaps the path just follows the hierarchy of the Data Explorer tree... either have the My Data item serve as the "root" of the virtual drive, or perhaps you could assign an Info Item to be the root for a virtual drive.

[bkonia]

If it were to be done, I would suggest that perhaps the path just follows the hierarchy of the Data Explorer tree... either have the My Data item serve as the "root" of the virtual drive, or perhaps you could assign an Info Item to be the root for a virtual drive. [/B]

I was proposing the idea of a path attribute because you would probably only want to use this virtual disk for certain objects within the UR database and the physical location of these objects within the UR tree may not necessarily correspond to your desired path names.

For example, I might have a folder called "documents" that is nested many levels deep within the UR tree. However, it would be inconvenient to have to type a whole long path name every time I wanted to access this folder. Also, if I move this folder around within the tree, I wouldn't want the path to change, from the perspective of the Windows file system.

Therefore, I would like to be able to designate a path name, such as "U:\documents" that would be permanently attached to this object. Once that attribute is defined, I could always access the "documents" Info Item and its children using the "U:\documents" path name, even if I moved it to a different location within the tree.

The idea of assigning an Info Item as the root of the virtual drive is a valid alternative to what I proposed. You could have your virtual drive (or perhaps even multiple virtual drives) mapped to Info Items. Then, you could store all your files within those virtual drives and create logical links to the files contained within the virtual drives, from other locations within the UR database.

I think this type of functionality would give UR a huge advantage over every other PIM/Outliner on the market. It would really move UR out of the realm of traditional outliners into an entirely new class of software that would literally replace the Windows file system. The thing is, I don't think this would be that difficult from a programming perspective. The reason I say that is because:

1. UR already has most of the core functionality to support this. It has the capability to store/index files within its database. The only thing that's missing is the virtual device driver.

2. There are many applications on the market that use virtual disks for all sorts of things. For example, there are numerous applications that create encrypted containers on your hard drive and these containers appear in Windows Explorer as virtual drives. I'm sure there is off-the-shelf code readily available for implementing virtual disks within Windows applications.

[kevina]

We are only aware of one library on the market for creating a namespace shell extension, and it only works with Delphi (VCL). We haven't evaluated it so I can only presume it works, here is the url: http://www.shellplus.com/examples/namespace-extension-example.html. Ultra Recall is entirely written in C++ however...

If someone else is aware of a C/C++ library for a namespace shell extension, we would be glad to look at it. I can tell you from the research I've done personally that doing this from scratch would be an extensive project...

[bkonia]

If someone else is aware of a C/C++ library for a namespace shell extension, we would be glad to look at it. I can tell you from the research I've done personally that doing this from scratch would be an extensive project...

Kevin,

I'm not sure if this is helpful or not, but take a look at the following URL:

http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/ntifs.html

[HalfCyborg]

Truecrypt is a very popular virtual disk software that is open source.

http://www.truecrypt.org/