Thoughts on required nodes

[TotallyInformation]

• We need a node to do file/folder list/search operations - with multi-msg and array options for output. Supporting wildcards/globbing.

  • Add dropdown choice of files/directories or both (NB: see issue re upstream bug)
  • Add topic to config
  • Add input sanitation to parameters
  • Switch from text input to selectable types of input (msg.xxx, flow.xxx, JSONata, etc) for start, pattern & depth parameters
  • Add max files to process (to prevent out of memory errors)
  • Add more parameter overrides to inbound msg processing

• A node to do file copy operations - started

• A node to do file move operations

• A node to do file delete operations

• A node to create folders

• A node to create links

• A node to return file/folder information including size, type, ACL

And some general design thoughts:

• All file nodes should be able to take inputs such as the file name to operate on & should recognise the current OS users home folder where appropriate (probably only on Linux, maybe Mac? since on Windows environment vars can be used) with a note in the docs to make it clear that the "user" concerned is the one running Node-RED.
• All the nodes should support globbing where appropriate

Other ideas to think about

• Maybe switch from readdirp to klaw which used to be fs-extra/walk.

[rcarmo]

I’d like to have a couple of nodes to read and write/append to files that followed the same message conventions - the ones that ship with Node-RED are fiddly to use in general...

[TotallyInformation]

Thanks for the feedback Rui.