[ATTENTION], "problem" with FolderItem.Exists

[Kevin Windham]

On Feb 21, 2005, at 9:03 AM, jda wrote:
>
> Kevin, do you use RB? I ask because if you do you should know that 
> GetSaveFolderItem (see above) is a standard method for obtaining a 
> folderItem prior to saving a file to disk:
>
> f = GetSaveFolderItem("", "database1")
>
> It puts up a standard "Save As" dialog box.
>
> If you click Save and the file already exists, you are asked if you 
> want to replace it with a new file. You can cancel or proceed. If you 
> proceed, a folderItem is created. Valentina hasn't yet entered the 
> picture.

Does the bug only occur with a folderitem created from 
GetSaveFolderitem? How does valentina know that? I am looking at this 
from an API perspective. Not from the user perspective. What if the 
developer passed in a folderitem that existed and didn't use the 
GetSaveFolderitem. Wouldn't the bug still happen? Now the user has lost 
a file that they didn't agree to losing.

Like I said, this is just my opinion, but a command called create 
should create something, not destroy something. I personally would not 
intentionally choose to allow a create command that I put in one of my 
own programs to destroy something. It's unexpected and 
counter-intuitive.

That's all I'm getting at. It's a separation of powers kind of thing.

> You pass this folderItem to Valentina in db.create(f...). Valentina 
> overwrites the existing file. This triggers the bug.

I'm still not sure this is a "bug" in the sense that RB is doing 
something wrong. A plugin changed a file reference out from under it. I 
think there is a folderitem API in the plugin SDK and if it's not used 
to update the folderitem in Ruslan's code, then I don't think it's an 
RB problem. I don't know what Ruslan is doing in his code, and if it 
were up to me I wouldn't necessarily change anything except returning 
false if the folderitem you want "created" already exists.

Just my 2¢, feel free to ignore if you like. It seems that happens a 
lot these days. :-)
Kevin