FolderItem.Child not working as expected

General
1

I’m sure this is entirely on me, but I’m loading a JSON file that is filled with relative path filenames. I have a FolderItem which I use as the “project root”, and was expecting to be able to do things like:

var f as FolderItem = root.Child(json.Value("imagePath").StringValue)

However, if - for example - the JSON imagePath is something like "data/images/logo.png", after calling root.Child the resulting FolderItem is now:

"/My/Project/root/data:images:logo.png"

Which is obviously very unusable and the file isn’t found. If I loop with a .Split("/") and individually append each child item then it works as expected.

Is there a way for me to do what I want here without having to manage OS-dependent path separators and splitting myself?

2

You can combine the filepath of the root folder with the one from “imagePath”
I used one path for the Desktop Folder, and then another for the text file inside on folder that’s inside another folder that’s on my desktop.

Var f As FolderItem = SpecialFolder.Desktop

If f.Exists And f <> Nil Then
  MessageBox("Found Desktop Folder " + f.Name)//Found the folder
End If

Var p As String = f.NativePath

Var s As String = "Test Paths/Path 01/Path 1A/Test Doc.txt"

Var fp As String = p + "/" + s


f = New FolderItem(fp, FolderItem.PathTypeNative)

If f.Exists And f <> Nil Then
  MessageBox("Found " + f.Name)//Found the file
End If
3

Is not working as expected because we guess that using .Child will convert the string that shows ‘/’ to .child(“data”).child(“images”).child(“logo.png”) but that is not how this works.

As Mark said, create your string then use the FolderItem creator to get what you need.

4

What @AlbertoD said. So yes, you will have to worry about the platform dependent separator. But you could make a platform dependent string constant for that, at least.

5

Not the answers I was hoping for, but thank you all.

Follow-up: is the documentation wrong regarding the Extension property? It states that it can be used to get and set the extension, but no matter what I do it never sets.

6

It could be a Documentation bug, or a code bug.
Please open an Issue if you don’t find one.

7

I can confirm that Xojo allows you to assign a new value to a FolderItem.Extension property, however, it does not change the underlying FolderItem. This is true even when the FolderItem does not represent an actual file on disk.

So it is not just a documentation issue, the property is Read / Write but assigning doesn’t do anything.