Question

What is the best way to get the path from the NSData bookmark object, if the bookmark will not resolve?

Normally, you just resolve the bookmark, you get a URL, and off you go. But if the bookmark is to an NFS mount that is not currently present, it won’t resolve. So now I have an NSData pointing somewhere that won’t resolve, but I don’t know where it points.

Here is the code block I have that loads the bookmarks, tries to resolve them, and attempts to decode the NSData if the resolve fails, but I can’t figure out the encoding – is this even possible?

NSError* error = [[NSError alloc] init];
NSURL* resolvedURL = [NSURL URLByResolvingBookmarkData:bookmarkData 
                                               options:NSURLBookmarkResolutionWithSecurityScope | NSURLBookmarkResolutionWithoutUI 
                                         relativeToURL:nil 
                                   bookmarkDataIsStale:NULL 
                                                 error:&error];
if (resolvedURL) {
    // do some stuff
    ...
} else {
    NSString* msg  = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Error Resolving Bookmark: %@", error];
    NSLog(msg);
    // the below certainly doesn't get me a path from the bookmark, any idea what will?
    // NSString* path = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:bookmarkData encoding:NSUTF32StringEncoding];
}

Answer 1

I never did figure out the encoding, but I found a workaround.

Originally, I encoded the sandboxed NSURLs into NSData objects, and then stored those as an NSArray in NSDefaults. Therefore, I had no way to determine the path for the NSData, unless it would resolve.

The workaround was to change the design – now I encode the sandboxed NSURL, store it as an object into an NSDictionary with the key being the URL path, and store the NSDictionary in NSDefaults.

With this approach, I can easily retrieve the NSData for any given path, even if it will not resolve.