Adobe AIR Development

[Makkornall]

I am currently trying to access files that are stored on a NAS on my local network.  Does anyone know if you are able to access files on a local network or how to discover the available network drives?

Thanks for the help.

[Levion]

Hi,

what's the protocol you use to access your NAS ( Samba, NFS, ... )?

regards

Levion

[peter9477]

There are some obscure signs that Samba may be supported on the device, but that's only because I see a few Samba-related pieces in the QNX filesystem there.  Doesn't mean they're intending to expose any of it for users, though I can well imagine doing that would fit in with the "enterprise" market focus.

At the moment, however, I very much doubt there is any support for that.

[Makkornall]

Usually I use Samba, but the NAS can support most protocols.

[peter9477]

Maybe if you list some of them we can consider each...

[Makkornall]

All of the following are supported:

CIFS

AFP

WebDAV

iSCSI

NFS

SNMP

[peter9477]

Okay, so of those:

• CIFS: this is what Samba talks to, so previous answer applies
• AFP: never heard of it.  [googles] Ah, Apple.  Well, I wouldn't count on that to come first.
• WebDAV: I doubt it
• iSCSI: appears not to be targetted for this sort of device, so I'd say doubtful
• NFS: certainly QNX supports that, but my Samba answer applies for now
• SNMP: not in the same vein as the others... this is for remote management, not data transfer per se

So basically you'd want to find if CIFS, AFP, or NFS is going to be supported.  I have no doubt that it's technically feasible to support those, though I have no idea if there's AFP support in QNX.  Easy to check if you're interested.

I'm pretty sure nothing has been said in any RIM presentation or through any other official (or, to my knowledge, unofficial) channel about whether these types of network access would be supported.  They might be interested to hear the use cases you have in mind for it.  I would imagine that most uses they've thought of so far would be well handled simply by using existing means of access to Intranet servers and such (e.g. to load videos).

[Makkornall]

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peter9477 wrote: 

I would imagine that most uses they've thought of so far would be well handled simply by using existing means of access to Intranet servers and such (e.g. to load videos).

---

Would you mind telling me which means you are referring to?

Thank you.

[peter9477]

The main one I had in mind there was a company that wanted to access various large files using PlayBooks would simply host them on an HTTP-accessible intranet page, with authenticated access if appropriate.  So you're in a meeting and want to do a presentation... you just browse to where you've stored the presentation (via browser) and launch it... flash video or whatever. 

Same for retrieving a .doc etc.  Hmm... now that I say that, I guess if I were using a PB internally and wanted to access arbitrary .doc files to view or edit, I'd be rather bothered if I couldn't get to them just because they were in the shared network folders and not carefully organized into some intranet site.  Of course one could configure the intranet to be a view through to the network drive, but that's not really the same thing, is it?  (no easy ability to write back changes, for one)

So it is an interesting question for RIM... I don't think anyone else has an answer yet.  (Clearly I don't! :-) )

[Makkornall]

Hopefully they take a look  =).

I appreciate the responses and your help.