Draft

Introduction

Filestreams can be complicated. When writing mC2 we thought about how to make a filestream as flexible as possible so that we could extend them to read from local files as well as from http streams. The result was a simple and very extendible interface that can be extended to read from anything like http stream, P2P streams or archives (RAR, ZIP).

How to create a new filestream type

The interface is very simple. All you need to do to make a new type of filestream is basically to extend the IFileStream interface. The IFileStream contains the basic file IO operations like Open, Close, Read, SetPosition, etc and needs to implement most of them.

Writing a plugin that extends filestreams also requires you to make a interface that can create the new IFileStream. This is done by extending the IFileStreamFactory that only contains 2 methods:

• bool CanReadFile(const utfchar *filename): Should return if this kind of stream is able to read the specified filename. For instance if you are writing a httpstream plugin, this method should check if the filename is starting with http://
• IFileStream* OpenFile(const utfchar *filename): Create a new filestream from the filename specified.

How to create a filestream

This is the simple part.

#include <core/filestreams/Factory.h>

using namespace musik::core;
...

filestreams::FileStreamPtr myFile = filestreams::Factory::OpenFile(UTF("http://www.musikcube.com/my_song.mp3"));

if(myFile){
    // Start using the file
}