[JCLOUDS-992] jclouds improperly handles "application/directory" blobs during LIST

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 1.9.1, 2.0.0
• Fix Version/s: 2.0.0
• Component/s: jclouds-blobstore
• Assignee: Timur Alperovich
• Reporter: Timur Alperovich
• Created: 18/Aug/15 00:45
• Updated: 27/Aug/15 22:18
• Resolved: 21/Aug/15 01:13

Description

To support directory-style interaction with blob stores, jclouds treats application/directory blobs as "special" during LIST. There are specifically two ways this is manifested:
1. the blob storage type is set to RelativePath. This is problematic, as RelativePath is also used to represent CommonPrefixes – the prefix of common names up to the delimiter character (or string) if the delimiter is set. This makes it impossible for an application to discern whether there are actually relative paths in the listing or whether these are just directory objects
2. the returned name does not contain the last character (the separator suffix). jclouds has a list of common suffixes that are stripped off in such a way: _$folder, /, and \

These two issues combined present an interface that may be unexpected to applications. Instead of jclouds implementing some of this functionality, I think jclouds should push to the end users of the library to implement it. I'm not sure how many people do rely on this, however, and it's not clear what the impact would be of fixing it. I will submit a PR to address this issue in all providers that does the following:
1. do not mutate blob names
2. do not list directory blobs as RelativePaths

Issue Links

• relates to: JCLOUDS-856 openstack-swift provider mangles blob names that end with slash
• relates to: JCLOUDS-121 Missing trailing slash in blob names