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IO

IO platform features

As IO is often largely platform specific, most of the features in this class are available on certain platforms or sets of platforms.

For example, when attempting to use the native OS file dialogs, they will only exist on desktop platforms, as they do not exist elsewhere.

To alleviate frustration with missing API nodes, the IO functions are nested one depth below the user facing API in the app.io.platform instance instead. This means for example, if you wanted to use a file open dialog you would call app.io.platform.dialog_open() instead of app.io.dialog_open.

The full documentation of public facing and platform specific are linked here.

IO and files

Remember that 99.9% of the time you should be using the assets class for IO!

use app.assets.bytes('file.name');

For if you really want low level file access,
Know that haxe has it’s own set of IO classes,
and that writing and reading files through haxe is possible and safe, on platforms where it makes sense.

However, haxe io doesn’t necessarily account for platforms where file IO is non-standard. The current only example of this is on Android, where file IO is handled from inside of the APK file at runtime.

Luckily, snow handles the details internally through SDL, and you can access reading file operations from the IOFile class, in the following way :

Use the assets system for IO!

This is purely a low level example

override function ready() {

    //import snow.platform.native.io.IOFile;

        // _id:String, ?_mode:String="rb"
        // the mode matches c++ file IO modes

    var file : IOFile = IOFile.from_file( 'file.name', 'rb' );

    //file.read
    //file.write
    //file.seek
    //file.tell
    //file.close

} //ready

Desktop specific file watch and file drop API

snow supports live OS file change notifications on any folder using the platform specific functions on desktop.

This allows hot reloading of asset files, as soon as the change, are removed, or are created on disk.

The asset guide explains reloading an asset once it changes.

snow also supports file drop notifications, which happen when a file is dropped onto your application icon (mac) or window (linux/windows).

All of these events are lower level, and are handled directly by listening for the override function on_event( event:SystemEvent ) in your app.

A higher level API with callbacks is on the roadmap too.

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