internal package Foswiki::Store::PlainFile

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Perl Module:

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internal package Foswiki::Store::PlainFile is a Foswiki::Store

Single-file implementation of Foswiki::Store that uses normal files in a standard directory structure to store versions.

• Webs map to directories; webs only "exist" if they contain a preferences topic.
• Topics are in data/.../topic.txt. If there is no .txt for a topic, the topic does not exist, even if there is a history.
• Topic histories are in data/.../topic,pfv/
  • Each rev of the topic has a numbered file containing the text of that rev (1 2 3 etc) each with a corresponding metafile 1.m 2.m etc.
• Attachment histories are in data/.../topic,pfv/ATTACHMENTS/attachmentname/
  • Each rev of an attachment has a numbered file containing the data for that rev (same as a topic), each with a corresponding metafile (same as a topic)
• The latest rev always has a history file (note: this means that large attachments are stored at least twice; same as in the RCS stores)
• 'date' always comes from the file modification date
• 'author' and 'comment' come from the metafile
• 'version' comes from the name of the version file

A note on character encodings. This module is designed to work best when data is stored using UTF-8, but can also use an alternate encoding by setting {Store}{Encoding}. Conversion to/from the alternate encoding is done at the lowest possible level - before calling file-level operations - so in general, strings can be assumed to be UTF-8 encoded byte strings.

NOTE: Perl's low-level file operations treat file names as sequences of bytes. When a function such as 'open' is called and is passed a unicode string, 'open' interprets that string as a string of bytes. As such it is not strictly necessary to change the encoding of strings passed to these low-level functions unless {Store}{Encoding} is set to something other than 'utf-8'.