Accessing the filesystem

Question

Is it possible to acces the real filesystem (not a vfs) through libc with abode air? Even if this do not work for a release build that would be nice. I am trying to setup a dev environement with Lua, but each time I change my assets I have to compile a vfs and my as3 project. It would be really nice to be able to add assets without compiling each time, since as3 compilation (when linking with a flascc swc) is a bit long.
Also, at the moment I am loading my lua files with an URLLoader, but then I need to execute the file as a string (doString in lua), but a lua doString is a bit harder to debug than a real file. So I'd prefer to do it with a doFile call (which need to do it through libc).

Answer 1

We do provide a VFS based on URLLoader; you can see an example in the filesystem sample (samples/07_FileSystem). While I haven't tried it, I believe that Air will alow you to access local files via URLLoader. That said, the current implementation of the URLLoader VFS does some processing on the files that would need to be performed each time they change, so it may not speed up your development cycle much. If that's the case, you could try writing a custom VFS by implementing the IBackingStore interface. Note that the VFS system assumes that once your program is running, all changes to the filesystem are performed either via libc or the VFS ActionScript interface. In other words, if you make any changes to the files on your native filesystem, you'll need to relaunch your SWF or Air program before you'll see the changes.