I’m trying to find a option/setup to centrally administrate the synch of files, i.e. I’m not talking about permission to synch a file as the user able to see a file itself but about adding these files to a queue of downloaded files which can be used offline.
We want to “push” files to the Android clients. The admin or a program knows which files are going to be important for each user. There are a lot of files, many users share large subsets of offline used files, the users are not that tech savy, and the users are not willing to select the files they want/need to synch.
In detail: We would like to set up “administrative” accounts for assistants to the users; the assistants shall be able to add labels/tags to users and files. Files matching any of a users labels/tags shall be added to the list of downloaded (offline available) files without further user intervention needed.
Is such a kind of mechanism already available or might a existing feature be used as a substitute? If not, do you think it is it possible to implement it without rewriting the whole application? If so, where should we start?
Thanks in advance for any of your hints pointing me in the right direction!
Hmm, for the desktop client, tags and groups would do the Job, but the android client does not yet offer and auto download feature. Users have to manually select the files as favorites to keep them offline available.
You could try 3rd party apps like FolderSync to connect to specific folders on the cloud and put those important files into these to keep them auto synced.
There is a very active development of the client, if you need assistance on how to start development, you should try to reach out to the developers directly. Here is an overview, what is planned for the next releases:
In the bug tracker you can find some ideas/feature request.
With tagging/commenting and other stuff, you could perhaps work around. There is a big update in the pipeline, version 2.0.0 is expected to be released very soon with a huge amount of new features.
I can’t see how this is related to the Android client itself… What about iOS and other OS?
Where is the information about favourites stored? On the (Android) client? I tend to think that’s not a good decision.
It doesn’t seem to be sensible imagining I might use a tablet and a smart phone in parallel - maybe they even are not running the same OS. Shall they have different favourites? That seems odd and might be seen as insufficient usability.
To me this really seems to be a server side issue. The server is enforcing the security (I hope) and it should do the same job along for favourites.
Else: What would be the recommended way? Install a additional Android APK and Xyz OS (client) on every device used which connects to a (“different”?) server persisting the favourite status on objects that are stored in Nextcloud and changing the status and internals of the Android-client?
It doesn’t seem to be sensible to install an additional client - that said, maybe the Android and other OS clients would have to be modified.
But even if they are: That’s only half of the job and the information which file is a favourite has to be persisted on the server as well. As well an favourites admin option on the server would be needed to set the favourite status, isn’t it?
How else would you be able to set the favourite state on all clients?
So there is (maybe) a Android/client part (most probably much less complicated) but there has to be some kind of change/adoption of the server.
Anyway, with tagging and file access control you can perhaps work around this. Only allow sync of files with a certain tag. If it is a shared folder, you can impose this as a admin.
The question about auto sync / offline access should in the end always be a clients question. Every client needs to be able to decide/be configured to download content, offered by the server, or leave it, for limited drive space or whatever reason.
Favorites are a pure android (I guess also iOS?) client feature so far for offline access. Nothing about that is stored on the server. The server just allows access to the files or not, whatever the client is going to do with it.
But it would be a feature idea to allow configuration of the client to auto mark files as favourites, based on their tags?
Your admin could use the impersonate app to copy certain files/folder directly to the users Nextcloud account.
Another option would be to have a user that shares folders to Nextcloud users who need them.
For directly syncing to the Android device (instead of viewing and letting the user download what they need), you can use the Foldersync Android app. I think the dev/testing version of the Nextcloud has or at least will get such a feature too.