What's the best structure to conserve file related information?

I am building an interface whose primary function would be to act as a file renaming tool (the underlying task here is to manually classify each file within a folder according to rules that describe their content). So far, I have implemented a customized file explorer and a preview window for the files.

I now have to find a way to inform a user if a file has already been renamed (this will show up in the file explorer's listView). The program should be able to read as well as modify that state as the files are renamed. I simply do not know what method is optimal to save this kind of information, as I am not fully used to C#'s potential yet. My initial solution involved text files, but again, I do not know if there should be only one text file for all files and folders or simply a text file per folder indicating the state of its contained items.

A colleague suggested that I use an Excel spreadsheet and then simply import the row or columns corresponding to my query. I tried to find more direct data structures, but again I would feel a lot more comfortable with some outside opinion.

So, what do you think would be the b开发者_开发百科est way to store this kind of data?

PS: There are many thousands of files, all of them TIFF images, located on a remote server to which I have complete access.

---

I'm not sure what you're asking for, but if you simply want to keep some file's information such as name, date, size etc. you could use the FileInfo class. It is marked as serializable, so that you could easily write an array of them in an xml file by invoking the serialize method of an XmlSerializer.

---

I am not sure I understand you question. But what I gather you want to basically store the meta-data regarding each file. If this is the case I could make two suggestions.

1. Store the meta-data in a simple XML file. One XML file per folder if you have multiple folders, the XML file could be a hidden file. Then your custom application can load the file if it exists when you navigate to the folder and present the data to the user.

2. If you are using NTFS and you know this will always be the case, you can store the meta-data for the file in a file stream. This is not a .NET stream, but a extra stream of data that can be store and moved around with each file without impacting the actual files content. The nice thin about this is that no matter where you move the file, the meta-data will move with the file, as long as it is still on NTFS

Here is more info on the file streams http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364404(VS.85).aspx

---

You could create an object oriented structure and then serialize the root object to a binary file or to an XML file. You could represent just about any structure this way, so you wouldn't have to struggle with the

I do not know if there should be only one text file for all files and folders or simply a text file per folder indicating the state of its contained items.

design issues. You would just have one file containing all of the metadata that you need to store. If you want speedier opening/saving and smaller size, go with binary, and if you want something that other people could open and view and potentially write their own software against, you can use XML.

There's lots of variations on how to do this, but to get you started here is one article from a quick Google: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/objserial.aspx