External Entities Files storage

This module is now part of External Entities module v3. No further development will be done here (only security fixes for people still using External Entities v2 with this plugin).

Synopsis

This plugin for external entities enables the use of files as external entities.
It provides both a base plugin implementation and a base class for future other external entities file plugins.

It provides 2 different approaches to use files as external entities:

• consider files as entities (with a path, a name, a creation date, an owner, etc.). Read only.
• consider the content of files as containing entity data. Editable.

The first approach is implemented by this plugin as an example as well as by the External Entities Image File (exif) Storage plugin which provides additional data (exif data) to the default file data.
The second approach is implemented by other plugins such as TSV Files Storage plugin, JSON Files Storage plugin, Yaml Files Storage plugin and XML Files Storage plugin. They are all configurable to manage entities either by file (each single file contains field values of a single external entity) or by banks of entities (a file contains a list of external entities with their field values). It is possible to manage multiple file banks, use complex directory structures (with dynamic patterns) and use an index file to link an external entity identifier to a given file in the file system.

With the combination of External Entities Multiple Storages plugin and several external entity file storage plugins, it is possible to convert data from a file format to another (2 sources, on for reading, the other for writing).

The files storage plugin may also be used to restructure file paths (using a file index and field values to build the path and file name).

Requirements

• External Entities

Recommended modules

• External Entities Image File (exif) Storage plugin
• External Entities TSV Files Storage plugin
• External Entities JSON Files Storage plugin
• External Entities Yaml Files Storage plugin
• External Entities XML Files Storage plugin

Known problems

• XNTT Files Index generation does not work with XNTT multiple entities plugin (this is not a problem with the new version in xntt v3)

Credits

The Alliance Bioversity - CIAT.