drag and drop of UNC files into PI not working

[Nocturnal]

Hi,

I think this console snippet says it all:

open "file://orion/users/owner/eelko.tiff"
Reading 1 file(s):
C:/Program Files/PixInsight/orion/users/owner/eelko.tiff
<* failed *>
*** Error: No such file exists on the local filesystem: C:/Program Files/PixInsight/orion/users/owner/eelko.tiff
No files were loaded.


If I first copy the file to c:\temp and drag/drop from there it works fine. Looks like the UNC path is causing a problem.

 

[Juan Conejero]

Unless I'm missing something, there's no error in this behavior. The following URI:

file://orion/users/owner/eelko.tiff

corresponds to a relative path. The path is relative because if we remove the scheme specifier token (file://), the result is:

orion/users/owner/eelko.tiff

which is correctly interpreted as "something under the 'orion' subdirectory of the current directory". The current directory for the PixInsight Core application is "C:/Program Files/PixInsight" in your example.

If on the other hand the URI was:

file:///orion/users/owner/eelko.tiff

(note the three slashes) then the path would be absolute and PI would expect an "orion" subdirectory of the root directory.

So this is normal (and correct) standards-compliant behavior in PixInsight.

On the other hand, the URI you've used doesn't follow the Windows Uniform Naming Convention (UNC). A UNC path ?which is a Windows-only thing? is any path starting with two backslashes (or forward slashes, as Windows treats both equally in this context). for example:

\\FooServer\FooSharedFolder\path\to\foo.bar

is a valid UNC path.

 

[Andres.Pozo]

I can confirm that this bugs exists in Windows Vista 32bits. If I drag and drop the file \\server1\Andres\Pictures\2010-12-26 M1\M1_Ha_Light_002.fit PixInsight does not open it. In the console there is the following text:

open "file://server1/Andres/Pictures/2010-12-26 M1/M1_Ha_Light_002.fit"
Reading 1 file(s):
C:/Program Files/PixInsight/server1/Andres/Pictures/2010-12-26 M1/M1_Ha_Light_002.fit
<* failed *>
*** Error: No such file exists on the local filesystem: C:/Program Files/PixInsight/server1/Andres/Pictures/2010-12-26 M1/M1_Ha_Light_002.fit
No files were loaded.

 

[Juan Conejero]

Ah, I understand now. Sorry, dragging UNC file items is not supported. You can open them from standard file dialogs (File > Open) and with the open command from the console, but dragging and dropping them from e.g. Windows Explorer is not supported at present.