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.
"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.
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
NSCodingprotocol support to ease persisting alias data. (rentzsch) - Add methods that return
NSErrorobjects. (rentzsch)
1.0 (2002)
- Initial release.
##License
BDAlias is now released under the MIT License.