I'm curious: any plans to enable the Xview to show DRIVE object SHADOWs in the left-hand-side TREE view pane? (I'm guessing this may be called the ICON view?)
I'm asking b/c no no such objects have every shown up in any of my Xview folders, although they do show up as an actual OBJECT in the Details pane, which is a bit counter-intuitive, since the whole point of having a drive shadow is to treat it as a traverseable hierarchy, therefore ideally suited for the left-hand-side view pane.
Short answer: No. Long-winded answer:
First, all folder windows are 'container' windows which contain 'records' (think database record). Every WPS object has a record describing it that can be inserted into a container window so as to display it, manipulate it, etc. The window is versatile and can give you 3 different ways of looking at the data (icon/tree/details). You can insert the same record into multiple containers, but you can only insert it into any particular container once.
Next, the code that runs Tree view asks each
folder it's displaying whether it has any subfolders. If so, it inserts the first subfolder's record into the container as a child - this triggers the 'plus' sign. Now, a shadow of a folder is still a shadow. It
could get inserted into the tree since it's a proxy for a folder,
but it doesn't have subfolders so it doesn't get a plus. The code has to be written to say "this is a shadow, so lets look at the original". If so, it might find a subfolder there, insert that and get the plus. Later, if you expanded the folder shadow, all the other subfolders would get added to the container as well. Works great, or so it seems.
The
problem arises when you use that same window to navigate to the original folder whose shadow you expanded earlier. If you recall, an object can only be inserted once. Consequently, when you expand the original folder, it will have no subfolders because their records were used above as children of the shadow. Here's a demonstration: open your boot drive in tree view, then expand these folders: Desktop->Computer->Drives. Notice that your boot drive is missing from Drives - that's because it's record was already inserted at the top as the root record for this tree.
It's a zero-sum game at best, and hopelessly confusing if you don't understand the mechanics of why stuff "disappears" in tree view. I'd rather not go there. Instead, I'll see if there are any non-kludgy alternatives.