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Date Added / Date Last Opened

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2016 8:01 am
by mike
Hi, folks,

Few times I was asked to add an option to show "date added" column, and finally spent a several days on these attributes, while working on a flexible list presentation anyway.
However, I didn't find any reasonably performant way to gather these attributes, only thru talking to Spotlight services.
And this stuff is painfully slow - simply skyrocketing listings loading times by order of magnitude!
For example, my ~ dir listing is gathered in 0.5ms by default and fetching these two attributes raises this time to ~4ms.

So here's a question - how often do you use these attributes (or perhaps want to use)?
I mean to show this info in a column or to sort item by them.

Currently I think to add the functionality, but keep it turned off by default.

With regards,
Mike.

Re: Date Added / Date Last Opened

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2016 8:58 am
by darek
I've never used anything else than last modification date. If I sort by date, that's the only one I'm interested in.

As for the others... I've only checked "Last Opened" maybe few times in my life, if even that. And "Date Added" -- do you mean the creation time? It might be useful sometimes for tracking down a specific issue with a file, but I've never used it as a column and definitely never sorted by it. So here's one point of view, since you've asked :)

Re: Date Added / Date Last Opened

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2016 9:25 am
by mike
The fun fact is that Mac offers a standard Unix (BSD) "creation time" and it's own custom "added time", which are different :?
Finder even shows these two as a different columns and different sorting criterias.
So, basically, here we have 4 default Unix times - which NC currently supports, and 2 Mac-only times - which NC does not.

Re: Date Added / Date Last Opened

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2016 12:24 pm
by darek
Seems like something you could safely ignore then ;) Just support the Unix standard and see what happens in the future. From my point of view, modified date is a must, and created *might* be useful for someone in some special case. The rest... who cares? ;)

Re: Date Added / Date Last Opened

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2016 1:06 pm
by sasha
darek wrote:From my point of view, modified date is a must, and created *might* be useful for someone in some special case. The rest... who cares? ;)
+1

Re: Date Added / Date Last Opened

Posted: Wed Nov 09, 2016 5:46 am
by mike
Guys, thanks for opinions.
I've decided to discard "Date Last Opened", and fetch "Date Added" - it turns out to be possible to retrieve it alongside with other attributes via magic getattrlistbulk() syscall, which is really great.
And no Spotlight involved :)

Re: Date Added / Date Last Opened

Posted: Wed Nov 09, 2016 6:46 pm
by moonrak
sasha wrote:
darek wrote:From my point of view, modified date is a must, and created *might* be useful for someone in some special case. The rest... who cares? ;)
+1
+another 1