We use a proprietary MS-SQL based document imaging application that has recently added the ability to import Adobe Acrobat files. However, the company who wrote the application was assuming that when they query for files, the resulting returned list would be in alphabetical order. (This is important because the user must select one or more pdf files from a list of thousands -- not easy when the files could fall in any order in the list.)
While this is true for Windows machines with NTFS, it is not true for Windows machines using FAT based filesystems or (more applicable) Samba on Linux on an ext3 filesystem. The files returned are in directory order, not alphabetical. I was finally able to convince the author of the application to sort the list, but only after I convinced them that they can't assume Windows servers will always return lists in alphabetical order (I pointed them to an article on MSDN (thanks to someone on IRC) -- originally they said "We're not in the business of fixing Linux problems." -- I was kinda irked by that attitude.) Anyway because I'm sure there are other Windows apps out there that may have similar problems, I have two questions: 1) Is anyone working on a VFS module to alphabetize the list being returned to the client machine? (I know this would be a performance hit, but it might be necessary in some cases -- you could just do it for certain directories.) 2) Does anyone know of a filesystem available for Linux that will return files in alphabetical order? I haven't experimented yet, but that seems like it would be a time consuming experiment. TIA, --J(K) PS: I searched Google and the Samba archives for any information related to this, but came up with very little. I say this because I may have some terminology wrong (which is usually the case when Google can't find something)-- if that's the case, please correct me so I don't make the same mistakes in the future. -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba