HT201104 iCloud Drive FAQ raises more questions than it answers

I am tired of seeing statements from Apple stating that any file or folder can be stored on iCloud Drive and then kept up to date across all devices. As far as I can see this is simply not true. iOS has no file system as such, so you simply can't see files that aren't associated with a particular app. Another question I have seen asked by a number of people and to which I have seen no satisfactory answer is: where is my iCloud Drive folder locally on my Mac and is it backed up by Time Machine?
iCloud Drive is a total mess. Why oh why oh why didn't Apple just go and buy Dropbox. With Dropbox I know exactly where my local folder is and it is backed up with Time Machine. I can store any file I want and see it either through Finder on my Mac or Dropbox app on my iOS devices. If I want to open a particular file on an iOS device, I simply use the 'open in' and it's job done.
One thing that would make a massive difference here is a Dropbox like app for iCloud Drive. It wouldn't fix all the problems but it would go a long way to making it actually usable. Are there plans to do this?

I'm new to this forum but have shared your frustrations. Some of your technical questions may be answered in the latest Lenovo Personal Systems Reference (PSREF) version 403 released on July 20, 2011. The Ideacentre pdf has the B520 information. It can be found at:
http://www.lenovo.com/psref/pdf/icbook.pdf

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ColdFusion 11: custom serialisers. More questions than answers

G'day:
I am reposting this from my blog ("ColdFusion 11: custom serialisers. More questions than answers") at the suggestion of Adobe support:
@dacCfml @ColdFusion Can you post your queries at http://t.co/8UF4uCajTC for all cfclient and mobile queries.— Anit Kumar Panda (@anitkumar85) April 29, 2014
This particular question is not regarding <cfclient>, hence posting it on the regular forum, not on the mobile-specific one as Anit suggested. I have edited this in places to remove language that will be deemed inappropriate by the censors here. Changes I have made are in [square brackets]. The forums software here has broken some of the styling, but so be it.
G'day:
I've been wanting to write an article about the new custom serialiser one can have in ColdFusion 11, but having looked at it I have more questions than I have answers, so I have put it off. But, equally, I have no place to ask the questions, so I'm stymied. So I figured I'd write an article covering my initial questions. Maybe someone can answer then.
ColdFusion 11 has added the notion of a custom serialiser a website can have (docs: "Support for pluggable serializer and deserializer"). The idea is that whilst Adobe can dictate the serialisation rules for its own data types, it cannot sensibly infer how a CFC instance might get serialised: as each CFC represents a different data "schema", there is no "one size fits all" approach to handling it. So this is where the custom serialiser comes in. Kind of. If it wasn't a bit rubbish. Here's my exploration thusfar.
One can specify a custom serialiser by adding a setting to Application.cfc:
component { this.name = "serialiser01"; this.customSerializer="Serialiser"; }
In this case the value - Serialiser - is the name of a CFC, eg:
// Serialiser.cfccomponent { public function canSerialize(){ logArgs(args=arguments, from=getFunctionCalledName()); return true; } public function canDeserialize(){ logArgs(args=arguments, from=getFunctionCalledName()); return true; } public function serialize(){ logArgs(args=arguments, from=getFunctionCalledName()); return "SERIALISED"; } public function deserialize(){ logArgs(args=arguments, from=getFunctionCalledName()); return "DESERIALISED"; } private function logArgs(required struct args, required string from){ var dumpFile = getDirectoryFromPath(getCurrentTemplatePath()) & "dump_#from#.html"; if (fileExists(dumpFile)){ fileDelete(dumpFile); } writeDump(var=args, label=from, output=dumpFile, format="html"); } }
This CFC needs to implement four methods:
canSerialize() - indicates whether something can be serialised by the serialiser;
canDeserialize() - indicates whether something can be deserialised by the serialiser;
serialize() - the function used to serialise something
deserialize() - the function used to deserialise something
I'm being purposely vague on those functions for a reason. I'll get to that.
The first [issue] in the implementation here is that for the custom serialisation to work, all four of those methods must be implemented in the serisalisation CFC. So common sense would dictate that a way to enforce that would be to require the CFC to implement an interface. That's what interfaces are for. Now I know people will argue the merit of having interfaces in CFML, but I don't really give a [monkey's] about that: CFML has interfaces, and this is what they're for. So when one specifies the serialiser in Application.cfc and it doesn't fulfil the interface requirement, it should error. Right then. When one specifies the inappropriate tool for the job. What instead happens is if the functions are omitted, one will get erratic behaviour in the application, through to outright errors when ColdFusion goes to call the functions and cannot find it. EG: if I have canSerialize() but no serialize() method, CF will error when it comes to serialise something:
JSON serialization failure: Unable to serialize to JSON.
Reason : The method serialize was not found in component C:/wwwroot/scribble/shared/git/blogExamples/coldfusion/CF11/customerserialiser/Serialiser .cfc.
The error occurred inC:/wwwroot/scribble/shared/git/blogExamples/coldfusion/CF11/customerserialiser/testBasic.c fm: line 4
2 : o = new Basic();
3 :
4 : serialised = serializeJson(o);5 : writeDump([serialised]);
6 :
Note that the error comes when I go to serialise something, not when ColdFusion is told about the serialiser in the first place. This is just lazy/thoughtless implementation on the part of Adobe. It invites bugs, and is just sloppy.
The second [issue] follows immediately on from this.
Given my sample serialiser above, I then run this test code to examine some stuff:
o = new Basic(); serialised = serializeJson(o); writeDump([serialised]); deserialised = deserializeJson(serialised); writeDump([deserialised]);
So all I'm doing is using (de)serializeJson() as a baseline to see how the functions work. here's Basic.cfc, btw:
component { }
And the test output:
array
1
SERIALISED
array
1
DESERIALISED
This is as one would expect. OK, so that "works". But now... you'll've noted I am logging the arguments each of the serialisation methods receives, as I got.
Here's the arguments passed to canSerialize():
canSerialize - struct
1
XML
My reaction to that is: "[WTH]?" Why is canSerialize() being passed the string "XML" when I'm trying to serialise an object of type Basic.cfc?
Here's the docs for canSerialize() (from the page I linked to earlier):
CanSerialize - Returns a boolean value and takes the "Accept Type" of the request as the argument. You can return true if you want the customserialzer to serialize the data to the passed argument type.
Again, back to "[WTH]?" What's the "Accept type" of the request? And what the hell has the request got to do with a call to serializeJson()? You might think that "Accept type" references some HTTP header or something, but there is no "Accept type" header in the HTTP spec (that I can find: "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1: 14 Header Field Definitions"). There's an "Accept" header (in this case: "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8"), and other ones like "Accept-Encoding", "Accept-Language"... but none of which contain a value of "XML". Even if there was... how would it be relevant to the question as to whether a Basic.cfc instance can be serialised? Raised as bug: 3750730.
serialize() gets more sensible arguments:
serialize - struct
1
https://www.blogger.com/nullserialize - component scribble.shared.git.blogExamples.coldfusion.CF11.customerserialiser.Basic
2
JSON
So the first is the object to serialise (which surely should be part of the question canSerialize() is supposed to ask, and the format to serialise to. Cool.
canDeserialize() is passed this:
canDeserialize - struct
1
JSON
I guess it's because it's being called from deserializeJson(), so it's legit to expect the input value is indeed JSON. Fair enough. (Note: I'm not actually passing it JSON, but that's beside the point here).
And deserialize() is passed this:
deserialize - struct
1
SERIALISED
2
JSON
3
[empty string]
The first argument is the value to work on, and the second is the type of deserialisation to do. I have no idea what the third argument is for, and it's not mentioned directly or indirectly on that docs page. So dunno what the story is there.
The next issue isn't a code-oriented one, but an implementation one: how the hell are we expected to work with this?
The only way to work here is for each function to have a long array of IF/ELSEIF statements which somehow identify each object type that is serialisable, and then return true from canSerialise(), or in the case of serialize(), go ahead and do the serialisation. So this means this one CFC needs to know about everything which can be serialised in the entire application. Talk about a failure in "separation of concerns".
You know the best way of determining if an object can be seriaslised? Ask it! Don't rely on something else needing to know. This can be achieved very easily in one of two ways:
Check to see if the object implements a "Serializable" interface, which requires a serialize() method to exist.
Or simply take the duck-typing approach: if a CFC implements a serialize() method: it can be serialised. By calling that method. Job done.
Either approach would work fine, keeps things nicely encapsulated, and I see merits in both. And either make far more sense than Adobe's approach. Which is like something from the "OO Failures Special Needs" class.
Deserialisation is trickier. Because it relies on somehow working out how to deserialise() an object. I'm not sure of the best approach here, but - again - how to deserialise something should be as close to the thing needing deserialisation as possible. IE: something in the serialised data itself which can be used to bootstrap the process.
This could simply be a matter of specifying a CFC type at a known place in the serialised data. EG: Adobe stipulates that if the serialised data is JSON, and at the top level of the JSON is a key eg: type, and the value is an extant CFC... use that CFC's deserialize() method. Or it could look for an object which contains a type and a method, or whatever. But Adobe can specify a contract there.
The only place I see a centralised CFC being relevant here is for a mechanism for handling serialised data that is neither a ColdFusion internal type, nor identifiable as above. In this case, perhaps they could provide a mechanism for a serialisation router, which basically has a bunch of routes (if/elseifs if need be) which contains logic as to how to work out how to deserialise the data. But it should not be the actual deserialiser, it should simply have the mechanism to find out how to do it. This is actually pretty much the same in operation as the deserialize() approach in the current implementation, but it doesn't need the canDeserialize() method (it can return false at the end of the routing), and it doesn't need to know about serialising. And also it's not the main mechanism to do the deserialisation, it's just the fall back if the prescribed approach hasn't been used.
TBH, this still sounds a bit jerry-built, and I'm open for better suggestions. This is probably a well-trod subject in other languages, so it might be worth looking at how the likes of Groovy, Ruby or even PHP (eek!) achieve this.
There's still another issue with the current approach. And this demonstrates that the Adobe guys don't actually work with either CFML applications or even modern websites. This approach only works for a single, stand-alone website (like how we might have done in 2001). What if I'm not in the business of building websites, but I build applications such as FW/1 or ColdBox or the like? Or any sort of "helper" application. They cannot use the current Adobe implementation of the customserializer. Why? Because the serialisation code needs to be in a website-specific CFC. There's no way for Luis to implement a custom serialiser in ColdBox (for example), and then have it work for someone using ColdBox. Because it relies on either editing Application.cfc to specify a different CFC, or editing the existing customSerializer CFC. Neither of which are very good solutions. This should have been immediately apparent to the Adobe engineer(s) implementing this stuff had they actually had any experience with modern web applications (which generally aren't just a single monolithic site, but an aggregation of various other sub applications). Equally, I know it's not a case of having thought about this and [I'm just missing something], because when I asked them the other day, at first they didn't even get what I was asking, but when I clarified were just like "oh yeah... um... err... yeah, you can't do that. We'll... have to... ah yeah". This has been raised as bug 3750731.
So I declare the intent here valid, but the implementation to be more alpha- / pre-release- quality, not release-ready.
Still: it could be easily deprecated and rework fairly easily. I've raised this as bug 3750732.
Or am I missing something?
Adam

Yes, you can easily add additional questions to the Lookup.WebClient.Questions Lookup to allow some additional choices. We have added quite a few additional choices, we have noticed that removing them once people have selected them causes some errors.
You can also customize the required number of questions to select when each user sets them up as well as the number required to be correct to reset the password, these options are in the System Configuration settings.
If you need multi-language versions of the questions, you will also need to modify the appropriate language resource file in the xlWebApp.war file to provide the necessary translations for the values entered into the Lookup.

Can I "unload" iCloud? It's more trouble than it's worth!

can I "unload" iCloud? it's more trouble than it's worth.

You can turn it off, in iOS5 as well on Mac and PC. Always Systemsettings/ControlPanel -> iCloud. There are your options. From within iOS5 you can also delete the complete account.

After turning iCloud Drive on, no more local Documents

I turned on iCloud Drive today, and all my local Documents on my Iphone are gone. Even when turning iCloud Drive off again, they didn't reappear. Any chance to get them back ?

On OS X, don't the entire contents of your iCloud Drive synchronize with the hard drive of your Mac?
How can someone store files on iCloud that do not synchronize to the Mac? I know you can do this (in a way) with iTunes Match, and the forthcoming Photos App.
iCloud is not only iCloud Drive - there are also iCloud Photo Library (Beta), iTunes Match, iMovie Theater.
The paragraph you quoted is referring to the other iCloud services for large media files: music, photos, movies, not iCloud Drive, which is meant for documents - a common storage for all your documents, updated across all devices.
Music files: With iTunes Match, you can store your complete iTunes library in iCloud, after backing it up on an external drive.
Image files: With Cloud Photo Library (Beta) you can keep all original photos in iCloud and only optimised previews on your devices. iCloud Photo Library (Beta) is not yet available on a Mac, but will be released this spring (see: Apple - OS X - Photos Preview)
Videos: iMovie Theater keeps your movies in iCloud and off your devices.
What happens if I have 500GB worth of data in my iCloud Drive and I link a Mac with only 250GB to it?
Don't let it happen. Apple does not explain what will happen in any of the support documents for iCloud Drive:
iCloud Drive FAQ - Apple Support
Manage your iCloud storage - Apple Support
From my own experience you will see plenty of cloud symbols for files that will not download to your Mac.
The general idea is, that the bulk of your data are media files, photos, videos, music, that will not use iCloud drive and are not synced to your mac. They will use your paid iCloud storage or iTunes Match storage, however.

HT201104 iCloud Drive and Photo Library

If I upload my entire Photo Library to iCloud Drive, then delete photos from my Library (on my computer), can I still access those deleted photos on my iCloud Drive?
Basically, my Photo Library is taking up too much space on my computer so I'm trying to alleviate some of that space without buying an external hard drive immediately.

If I upload my entire Photo Library to iCloud Drive, then delete photos from my Library (on my computer), can I still access those deleted photos on my iCloud Drive?
An iPhoto library will not work properly on iCloud Drive. It will be corrupted by the syncing. An iPhoto Library needs to be on a locally connected volume or on your system drive. Move your iPhoto Library to a small portable drive as described here: Use locally mounted Mac OS X Extended volumes for your Aperture library
A second problem is, that you cannot save space on your computer by uploading to iCloud Drive, because iCloud will keep local shadow copies of all items in your user library. Moving files to include Drive will not save any space at all. (iCloud Drive FAQ)

ICloud Drive vs iTunes Match questions

So I have been looking into different ways of having my music accessible throughout all of my OS devices. From what I have seen, I can either purchase a subscription to iTunes Match, or I can just purchase additional iCloud storage. Now just for the sake of my music, I would need to purchase a 200 GB plan, costing me about $50 a year, therefore the iTunes Match subscription would be the cheaper alternative at $24.99 a year. However I do have a couple of questions regarding both options.
Ideally, what I would like to do, is to be able to open iTunes on either my MacBook Air or my iMac, or the Music app on my iPhone or iPad, and be able to access and play any song in my entire collection. Also, syncing of playlists throughout my devices is something I desire greatly.
Now that OS X Yosemite is out (all my devices are either running OS X Yosemite or iOS 8), I understand that file sharing is made much easier. So this led me to think that maybe I should purchase additional storage and store my music in the iCloud Drive. But here is where I start needing some clarity. Suppose I open iTunes or the Music app on a device. Will my entire collection be visible through the app(s), or would I have to access iCloud Drive and play the files from there? Also, assuming that my entire collection can be seen via the app(s), will any playlists that I create be synced? Also concerning the iPhone, if I choose to play a song, will it get downloaded from the Drive onto the device, taking up internal storage, or will it get streamed? Is there, perhaps, a way to have these app(s) continuously sync their libraries with a specific "Music" folder on iCloud Drive (with playlists being synced)?
From what I understand from iTunes Match, all of my songs that are matched with songs from the iTunes Store will immediately be made available to me in my iTunes Library for playing. Now the songs that do not get matched: do they get uploaded to the storage that is provided by iTunes Match (25,000 songs), or do they get uploaded to my iCloud Drive? Are the songs that matched included in this 25,000 song limit, or does it only count the songs that didn't match? Will iTunes Match sync my playlists across all devices, regardless of which device the playlist was created on? Also, on the iPhone, same question as before, will songs be streamed from the storage that iTunes Match provides or will they have to be downloaded to play?
Based on how I want to be able to access and play my music, I'm inclined to think that maybe iTunes Match is the better (and cheaper) alternative? If simply using the iCloud Drive is good enough, then I wouldn't mind paying the extra amount for storage because I'm sure I'll be taking advantage of file sharing even outside of music. iTunes Match also has the ad-free iTunes Radio which might be cool too.
I'd love to hear what you guys have to say about this or if you have any better methods of keeping all music files organized and synced across all devices, then I'm all ears.
P.S this is my first post so sorry if it's lengthy.

ITunes match does not use iCloud Drive to store music. if you want to share music with all your devices, you should purchase iTunes Match. ICloud Drive provides storage for other non music data and you have 5gb free - you can purchase more if required.
JIm

Albums ... More questions than answers

Still looking for some answers to what's changed in Photos with albums ... and how these are different than Events and Albums in iPhoto.
A couple of simple questions.
1. If I delete a photo from an album does it delete the photo completely or is the original photo retained.
2. If retained, where?
3. If I import new photos from a camera, where do they go?
All pretty basic questions; and not answered in the Photos help section.

Thanks .. This helps a bit I think a lot of us are still struggling though; some of the changes with Photos are just not intuitive. A lot of us used Albums in iPhoto to create slideshows or just to sort our best picks and all photos were kept as Events. Albums in Photos seems to combine both Events and Albums that you can create and call all of these Albums.
I'm still not clear if there is a default album where imported photos go. My guess would be the "Photos" album. From there or from "last import" you can create a specific album. Not a small detail. I guess I'll see it when I import photos but why so complicated.

HT201104 iCloud drive set up is taking over an hour...is this normal?

I just loaded Yose on my macbook pro and I am trying to set up iCloud Drive...it has been spinning in set up mode for over an hour.

I started to have the problem when I was trying to sync 1Password after first loading Yose...and before I set up iCloud Drive via systems preferences. I fixed it by quitting the set up and re-booting a couple of times and starting over from system preferences/icloud. When I quit the set-up I just ok'd the warnings about not being able to access iCloud data. But not-to-worry all data seems to be available.

HT201104 iCloud Drive access through Safari on iOS

This may seem like an obvious omission (at least in my mind), but I would have thought Safari on iOS would access the iCloud Drive when I choose to upload a file? Any reason why not?

If you are using iCabMobile Web Browser and you set Browser ID to Safari 5 (Mac), you will be able to access icloud.com
http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee374/Diavonex/ca02eb53.jpg
http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee374/Diavonex/45ca713d.jpg

ICloud says I used more space than I actually do

Hi,
When I look in the pereferences of iCloud it says I used 3,77gb of the 5gb. When I look in "manage" the screen tells me I used not more than 1,5gb. what's happend?
Ramon

I've searched everywhere too for a solution and I finally caved in and restored my phone after backing up all of my photos to iPhoto. It's a pain, but it freed up about 6GB on my phone.
My device:
iPhone 5, 16GB

Expert Live Chat - More questions than answers?!

Shall we dissect today's chat then?
It sounded like an exciting idea. But I was left sorely disappointed.
No plans to enable the best features of mediaroom - the ability to access it from your laptop, phone and xbox.
Multi-room's something they're keen to offer in the future. (Wow - 4 years not long enough?!)
No details on whether the vbox will remain mediaroom or change for YouView.
No news on HD.
No news on Live IPTV
Overall I think it would be more beneficial if Cey just posted on the forum occasionally than we have a live chat. There was a fair amount of time wasted on regular forum type questions.

Oh well. Glad I missed it then.

My Discussions account shows more questions than I actually have

When I click on the "You have 6 unresolved questions" which is displayed in the right hand panel of my discussions account, I see only 3 unresolved questions. What happened to the other ones?
Weird.

Thanks but since the number of questions is listed but the questions themselves are not listed in "unresolved questions", there is no way for me to sort of do just that ...
Sorry, I read your original question to mean something like, "How can I mark my questions as 'Answered' when I can't see them on the My Questions page, and what causes this to happen?"

IDM Form components - more questions looking for answers

Having gotten deeper into IDM, particularly forms since joining this forum, I am still shocked by the sparse documentation available. here's hoping some of you have found some of this out already:
1. Is there a list of allowed HTML tags that will get through the getLocalizedString without being filtered?
2. Is there an up-to-date list of allowed properties for Form HTML Components? I have tried verbatim several examples from the documentation where I add properties to the EditForm component only to see them throw an exception when the server tries to display the page
3. Is there any way to consistently override IDM putting a nowrap="nowrap" attribute in my forms? I have placed <Property name='nowrap' value='false'/> in numerous locations to no avail.
4. Where can I find more information about setting defaults in the Component Properties object? I have tried to set a lot of component defaults here but only some seem to work.
Any and all help will be rewarded with much praise and thanks.

Hi Laxmi,
I hope most of the questions you have asked could be found through search....
Regarding Q8. you can go through this link
Re: customisation of infotypes
Thanks
Kishore

Icloud drive not working on ipad 3

iCloud drive not working on iPad 3. works fine on my MacBook Pro and iPhone 6. Utterly useless on iPad 3.

Hi there Chris Howlett,
Depending on the issues you are experiencing, you may find the articles below helpful.
Get help using iCloud Drive
iCloud Drive FAQ
-Griff W.

Can you share large files on iCloud drive like dropbox?

I am exploring how to use iCloud drive now...and had a basic question. Can you share large files from it in a similar way as you can with dropbox? This is a great feature of dropbox...or google drive when mailing large files just doesn't work.
I have a Yosemite beta currently, and it doesn't look like you can do this.
I also was wondering if anyone has figured out how to make an alias of the iCloud drive on the desktop rather than always opening a finder window in order to drop files into iCloud drive....
Yosemite Beta and Mavericks, iMac 2012/Mac Pro/Mac book air

I am exploring how to use iCloud drive now...and had a basic question. Can you share large files from it in a similar way as you can with dropbox?
Have a look at the iCloud Drive FAQ: The file size limit is 15 G: iCloud Drive FAQ http://support.apple.com/kb/HT201104
You can store any type of file in iCloud Drive, as long as it's less than 15 GB in size. There's no restriction on file type, so you keep all of your work documents, school projects, presentations, and more up to date across all of your devices. Learn more about managing your iCloud Drive files.
If you make an alias to a folder on iCloud Drive, you can drag it to the Favourites in the Finder sidebar. That is the best I could do.

HT201104 iCloud Drive FAQ raises more questions than it answers

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