Documented integration for other apps

[alexanderadam]

Pre-Submission checklist

• There is no existing issue that already asks for this feature.
• The feature already exists in rclone (on your PC or in Termux)
• I am prepared to help make this feature

What problem are you trying to solve?

I'm not quite sure how to describe this properly and I'm not even sure this is possible:
So many FOSS application would profit from cloud integration but it surely doesn't make sense for every maintainer to create it on their own.
Some maintainers won't do it because of its effort. Some maintainers might be tempted to use untrustworthy proprietary components to achieve that. And some storages aren't trustworthy either so users might want to have to data rather encrypted which might again be some obstacle for a developer.

What should extRact be able to do differently to help with this problem?

Rclone (and thus extRact) solves these things on its own. It does this job very well but other applications don't have the possibility to integrate extRact easily (at least as far as I know).

It would be great if the missing bits (i.e. a usable API) could be implemented and/or a possible way could be documented (in easy steps so that maintainers will happily integrate extRact instead of proprietary solutions).

I'm not an Android developer therefore I have no idea whether this would be possible.

A straightforward way would probably be some proposed in-app documentation that says something like

1. install extRact from here
2. configure it
3. mount it
4. activate SAF
5. point the path that you want to use to the extRact mount

But this is somehow complicated, isn't it?

I guess steps 2 - 4 could be automated with some kind of app scheme or URL and using the Android share functionality?

So something like rcxrclone://some.app.id/context that will automatically be handled from extRact which would open a wizards for the details and jump back if this was successful.

Again, I'm not quite sure whether any of this makes sense. This idea just came to my mind when I thought that one second diary or epistolaire backup would profit from extRact integration.

It would be nice to have a solution whose user experience is so great that my mother could do it.

PS: Otherwise it would be good to have a standardized description for other app maintainers If the protocol-thingy wouldn't work.

[newhinton]

So, if i understand this correctly, you want am automated way to create a remote, and then use it for whatever the app that started the creation wants to?

The idea is kinda neat. And rather easy to be done, however, i don't think other apps should/will implement this since it creates a dependency between this app and their app (that needs to be maintained at all times). The SAF is meant to solve this issue, by exposing apps to a common way to access folders independend on how they are implemented and thus alleviating the requirement of custom code.

If you take a look at the readme.md, you will find the Intentservice which allows other apps to trigger tasks, i will probably either to something similar to this or allow the activity to create remotes to be opened from other apps.

[alexanderadam]

I really have no idea what the best possibility would be.
But rclone is very good at integrating storage which is a feature many apps are lacking.
Some way of easy interaction would be nice.
Something that's easy for app maintainers to reference (or even integrate).
And something that's easy to use/understand from a users perspective as well.

I'm sure some FOSS app maintainers would be very open to something like that.
I already mentioned two example issues but F-Droid has other gems too. 😉

[sand-bit]

So android exposes this via the DocumentsProvider class, and the specific function needed would be openDocument.

Supposedly rcx already supports this:

Accessing cloud content from other apps (VCP)
Feature Quality: Preview, data loss is expected!

In addition to to reading local storage via the Storage Access Framework, a future version of rcx can allow other apps to access files on your cloud remotes from within those apps. You must enable this feature in Settings> File Access>Enable Content Provider Preview. Other apps can then be granted access to cloud files, just like rcx uses these interfaces to access local content.

Please note that this feature has not yet been released because there is an increased risk of losing data and it therefore requires extensive testing. For example, move operations can corrupt your data if the underlying file stream is not transferred completely.

Another example of a provider would be the SFTP provider here (github).

[newhinton]

The SAF was broken after the fork, but i fixed it with 49c299e. I have not done more extensive testing, so it should still be considered experimental.