Files

hSuite

File Locations

for hSuite Standalone Compilation

About Assets	The virtual file system.
App Created Files
Assets vs Real Files	Know the difference.
Unsupported Features	hSuite does not support confusion.

About Assets

All files that you need to exist 'before' you start your app must be under
[source] , [data] , or [databases] of you project base. These are called 'supported' directories.

[data] and [databases] must be indicated via hSuite options.
All the above files are known as Assets files.
They are read-only and are embedded into the package as a virtual file-system.
Internally, this VFS is a file that pretends to be a disk drive.

Files outside these supported directories will not get copied to assets, so will not exist before your app runs.
However, files outside these supported directories can be created 'after' your app runs. And they can even have
the same names and paths as the Assets files. The difference is that they will be created on the 'real ' file system.

App Created Files

Files can be created by your app code e.g using the TEXT and BYTE commands.
These files will created on the real file system (not Assets) on external storage (sdcard).

App created files are more flexible. They are writable and can be put anywhere under the
[app_path] directory. This is the directory just above [source], [data] and [databases].
( In fact, you even have write-access to [app_path]'s parent [com.rfo.myApp] ) which is the start of scoped-storage.
You can also create paths that are identical to Assets paths in supported directories (see below).

Assets vs Real Files

If an App creates a file with the same name as one in Assets e.g <..>/data/cartman.png
then you will have two different files of the same name on the same path.

The general rule for most commands is to first look on the real file system (sdcard). If it doesn't exist, then Basic will
look inside Assets. e.g FILE.OPEN, FILE.TYPE.. etc

The Exceptions to this rule is

a) RUN - Only looks in Assets
b) FILE.EXISTS - Only looks in real file system (sdcard i.e external).

Unsupported Features

Files to load at startup

Legacy Basic and perhaps other apk makers have a feature that supports copying files from read-only assets to the real-file-system during apk creation. These files will be copied to external storage (sdcard) at every program startup !!, overwriting any changes you may have made. This is undesirable in many situations.

hSuite does not support this feature, due to the confusion it creates.

If you need files that need copying from assets to external storage (sdcard), then the program must do this itself ,
e.g

file.exists e, "settings.dat"       % looks only on sdcard/data
if !e then                          % if not exist on sdcard /data
      byte.open r,fv, "settings.dat" % get it from assets
if fv<>-1 then byte.copy fv,"settings.dat"   % make a copy to sdcard/data
endif

The above manual method is much clearer and user-controllable.

File.Exists   only looks in file system. Does not look into /assets/
File.Type        first looks in the file system, if not found then looks in /assets/

file.exists e, paths$    % look only in the file system
if e then
     print "file is on sdcard"
else                      % not in file system
     file.type typ$, path$
     if typ$="x" then
    print "file does not exist anywhere"
     else
           print "file is in assets"
     endif
endif

-End.