Chapter 3. File System Connector

This connector exposes an area of the local file system as a graph of "nt:file" and "nt:folder" nodes. The connector can be configured so that the workspace name is either a path to the directory on the file system that represents the root of that workspace or the name of subdirectory within a root directory (see the workspaceRootPath property below). Each connector can define whether it allows new workspaces to be created. If the directory for a workspace does not exist, this connector will attempt to create the directory (and any missing parent directories).

By default, this connector is not capable of storing extra properties other than those defined on the nt:file, nt:folder and nt:resource node types. This is because such properties cannot be represented natively on the file system. When the connector is asked to store such properties, the default behavior is to log warnings and then to ignore these extra properties. Obviously this is probably not sufficient for production (unless only the standard properties are to be used). To explicitly turn on this behavior, set the "extraPropertiesBehavior" to "log".

However, the connector can be configured differently. If the "extraPropertiesBehavior" is set to "ignore", then these extra properties will be silently ignored and lost: none will be stored, none will be loaded, and no warnings will be logged. If the "extraPropertiesBehavior" is set to "error", the connector will throw an exception if any extra properties are used.

Perhaps the best setting for general use, however, is to set the "extraPropertiesBehavior" to "store". In this mode, any extra properties are written to files on the file system that are adjacent to the actual file or folder. For example, given a "nt:folder" node that represents the "folder1" directory, all extra properties will be stored in a text file named "folder1.modeshape" in the same parent directory as the "folder1" directory. Similarly, given a "nt:file" node that represents the "file1" file on the file system, all extra properties will be stored in a text file named "file1.modeshape" located next to the "file1" file. Note that the "nt:resource" node for our "nt:file" node also is stored in the same location, so we can't use the "file1.modeshape" file (it is already used for the "nt:file" node), so the connector uses the "file1.content.modeshape" file instead.