BDAlias

What is BDAlias?

BDAlias is a simple Cocoa class for dealing with alias records, a form of persistent file reference that is more robust and provides a better user experience than a textual path. Macintosh applications should always use alias records for persistent file references, and often for exchanging references to files with other applications.

How do I use BDAlias?

"You've got the source."

Seriously though, you create an instance of BDAlias using one of the aliasWithXXX: messages whenever you need to keep a persistent reference to a file around. If you're interacting with the rest of Cocoa, you'll probably use either aliasWithPath: or aliasWithPath:relativeToPath: When you're ready to "resolve" this reference to actually access a file, just send it a fullPath or fullPathRelativeToPath: message.

Since the whole point of aliases is to persistently reference a file, you can easily convert an alias to an NSData object. Sending a BDAlias the aliasData message will return an autoreleased instance of NSData containing the record data ready to store wherever you can store an NSData.

Version History

1.2.2 (Apr 20 2009)

• [CHANGE] Changed to MIT License. (Chris Hanson)

1.2.1 (Apr 19 2009)

• [FIX] Tweak for 64-bit compatibility. (Alexander Rauchfuss)

1.2 (Apr 9 2007)

• [NEW] Add equality methods (Daniel Jalkut).
• [CHANGE] Move project to http://rentzsch.com/trac.

1.1 (Oct 6 2006)

• Add NSCoding protocol support to ease persisting alias data. (rentzsch)
• Add methods that return NSError objects. (rentzsch)

1.0 (2002)

• Initial release.

##License

BDAlias is now released under the MIT License.