Suggest to make NotFoundFileInfo and NoopChangeToken public

[PrimeObjects]

[Eilon]

Can you clarify the reason for wanting them public? Are you writing a custom file system provider? Or something else?

[PrimeObjects]

Hi Eilon,

I'm writing a ViewFileProvider, I hope this FileProvider can serve MVC by using view files saved in the database.

I need to return NoopChangeToken and NotFoundFileInfo like what RazorEmbeddedFileProvider did.
I want to use the one defined in .NET in my class directly.
e.g.

public IChangeToken Watch(string pattern)
        {
            return NoopChangeToken.Singleton;
        }

Thanks
Gary

[Eilon]

Ah, got it. So just for code re-use, which sounds fine. Just wanted to make sure it wasn't for checking equality, which would be wrong (e.g. checking if (foo.GetType() == typeof(NoopChangeToken)) and making some decision based on that.

[PrimeObjects]

thank you for reminding. I cloned the two classes into my namespace for now. if you decide to make the two classes public I should be able use them directly.

Thanks again.
Gary

[mgrosperrin]

Hi,
maybe we could provide a factory to create empty implementation of these types (IFileInfo, IDirectoryContents and IChangeToken). This would protect against comparing the type (except if people do scary things like foo.GetType() == factory.GetXXX().GetType()) and allow reuse of the types.
I can provide you a PR to prototype it if needed (I just need a name for the project hosting the factory 😄).

[pranavkm]

@PrimeObjects all of these packages are in the Microsoft.AspNet.FileProviders.Sources package. You should be able to reference them and use that.

[mgrosperrin]

@pranavkm I have tried to do this for my composite file provider, but the Microsoft.AspNet.FileProviders.Sources package has not been published in the RC1 wave. Will it be published as part of RC2 (it is in the nightly) ?

[pranavkm]

We don't publish any of the Sources packages to NuGet.org. You'd have to pick it up from aspnetmaster.

[Driedas]

I second this suggestion, my use case is a custom IFileProvider that internally wraps the PhysicalFileProvider to provide a virtual file system, returning files based on other criteria than just the file path. If all criteria fails to find the requested file, I would like to return NotFoundFileInfo directly. Returning null just yields a NullReferenceException in Microsoft.AspNet.StaticFiles.StaticFileContext.LookupFileInfo()

[MiloSmith]

I agree with this, I am using SaasKit and have a tenant context. My file provider takes that context into account and servers up files based on the tenant. I had to copy several classes into my code from the source, and that is a pretty ugly solution. Because of this, I get the impression that you guys don't want us making new file providers. Is that the correct? Am I missing something here?

[pranavkm]

@Eilon - thoughts on publishing the NoOp* types from Sources into Abstractions?