"Open locally" only works with enumerated files

[jospoortvliet]

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Feature request

33.0.0 and 33.0.2 for client

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
In the browser you can choose to edit a file locally. Sadly, this only works when the file is already synced. With selective sync, this makes sense - one would have to enable that folder and all its parents. That can mean syncing tons of files. But with virtual files, we can just sync that file (and add its parents) without having to sync any other files,

Describe the solution you'd like
Well, do that - sync that file and then open it!

Describe alternatives you've considered
Not doing it and not benefitting from a cool thing VFS can do and selective sync can't ;-)

This is the feature I refer to:

Also available in Nextcloud Office.

[jospoortvliet]

ok, there might also be a bug, as I now navigated to the file, downloaded it, and...

[mgallien]

that would be also an issue for Windows users if they never accessed the folder in which the file is
the file to locally open would be also missing (similar to what you get with selective sync if you do not sync it)

[i2h3]

Our macOS file provider extension enumerates server content only when the user browses folders. When a user has never visited a folder like"/Documents", the content is not known to macOS and does not exist in the local file system. Hence the file cannot be opened. To enable this, the main app must tell our file provider extension through an XPC call to fetch and enumerate all folders down the path to open to inform macOS about the content, afterwards the file can be opened.

I saw code about this in the past when I took over but I do not know whether it was a finished feature implementation or I misunderstood something.

We need to provide a visual feedback for this potentially long running task. Just for example, a user might decide to "Open locally" /Something/Which/Is/Far/Down/A/Complex/Hierarchy in which every folder level has a lot of items. Due to the on-demand enumeration of the whole path and the content of each level, it might take a while.