Re: Carbon port: setting the creator code (patch)

[David Reitter]

On 9 Jul 2005, at 17:08, Steven Tamm wrote:

> Fine.  You can do the same thing with osascript (although it's much  
> more annoying).

I did that for a while, until I had a bug report from a user saying  
that it started Finder every time he saved a file. The AppleScript  
had to go through the Finder to set the creator code. Turns out that  
the user was running a replacement for Finder. Lesson learned:  
AppleScript is only a user-level API. :-(


> The problem I have with it is that it will only set it to "EMAx",  
> it can't set the file type, it will modify the creator code of  
> already existing files, it doesn't test for UFS drives, etc.
> http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2017.html

It is meant to modify the creator code of an existing file.
I don't know if we need to check for UFS drives (works fine for me on  
SMB mounts; the OS takes care of creating metadata files which is not  
nice, but none of our business on application level). I don't know  
how to check for that - maybe you can add that.


> Furthermore, Creator codes are being deprecated and replaced with  
> file extension based mapping or Universal Type Identifiers.
> http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/ 
> understanding_utis/

Yes they are and that is known, but users wanted it and I hear it  
plays a role in Spotlight. (I don't know anything about that in detail.)

> That doesn't mean we shouldn't add the feature to "set a creator  
> code", but it should take in the code as a parameter (a four  
> character string or a 32-bit number).
> (mac-set-creator-type "EMAx")
> (mac-set-file-type "TEXT")

Yes, done. See next message.

- D