File Storage

Using Cerulean you can list files and folders in a file share.

When listing files and folders, Azure File Storage REST API only returns the file name and the size of the file. However at times you would want to see other properties like last modified date of files as well. Cerulean has a convenience feature where you can instruct Cerulean to fetch these properties of listed files and display them alongside file name and size.

Pagination to view files and folders is supported by default and you can easily navigate from one page of results to another page using Cerulean.

Using Cerulean you can easily delete one or more files and folders. File and folder deletion deletion happens via a background task.

In case of files, Cerulean enumerates over files and delete them one by one. In case of folders, Cerulean lists the files and folders in that folder and then deletes those files one by one. Folders are deleted recursively i.e. all files in a nested folder are deleted first and then nested folder is deleted. Only when a folder is empty, it is deleted. This is a limitation from the service side where in a folder must be completely empty before it can be deleted.

Using Cerulean you can manage properties of a file. You can view system defined properties like last modified date, etag, size, file creation time, file last written time, file last changed on time, NTFS attributes and permissions etc. of a file.

You can also manage HTTP properties like "cache control", "content encoding", "content language", "content type", and "content md5" etc. of a file. Using Cerulean you can easily update these properties of a file.

Another useful feature in Cerulean is that you can change these properties of more than one file in bulk without changing the properties of each file individually. For example, if you want to change "cache control" property of many files together, you can easily do so with Cerulean by simply selecting the files (and folders) and then specifying the new property value. Cerulean takes care of the rest for you. The properties you can change in bulk include file's HTTP properties (cache control, content encoding, content language, content type etc.), NTFS attributes and file permission.

Using Cerulean you can manage properties of a folder. You can view system defined properties like last modified date, etag, file creation time, file last written time, file last changed on time, NTFS attributes and permissions etc. of a folder.

Another useful feature in Cerulean is that you can change these properties of more than one folder in bulk without changing the properties of each folder individually. The properties you can change in bulk include folder's NTFS attributes and folder permission.

Using Cerulean you can manage (view and/or update) metadata (user-defined key/value pair) of a file or a folder.

Using Cerulean you can create a Shared Access Signature (SAS) for a file. You can create an ad-hoc SAS token/URL (i.e. without using any file share access policy) or a SAS token/URL with a file share shared access policy.

Using Cerulean you can easily upload files and folders from your local computer to a file share. You can select one or more files and upload them. You can also select one or more folders and upload them. You can also drag files and folders from your local computer and drop them on a file share node in the UI to upload them. Upload functionality in Cerulean is quite flexible and feature rich. To learn more about upload functionality, see the upload section below.

Using Cerulean you can download one more files and folders from a file share to your local computer. Download files functionality in Cerulean is quite flexible and feature rich. To learn more about download functionality, see the download section below.

This is another unique feature of Cerulean where you can simply double click a file to open and view it. Under the covers, Cerulean downloads the file in temp folder and tries to open it with registered application for that file type.

This is a neat feature in Cerulean where you can copy one or more files and folders to application clipboard and then paste those items to another file share or a blob container in same or different storage account.

What paste does is that it initiates a background task and there it copies the files from source to target asynchronously. In case of folders, Cerulean will recusrively list the files in the source folder (what was copied) and copies those files asynchronously in the target file share or blob container. Target file share or blob container can be in the same or different storage account.

Considering copy blob operation is an asynchronous server-side operation, you can instruct Cerulean to wait for the server-side copy operation to complete before marking a blob as completely copied.

Using Cerulean you can rename a file or a folder. Please note that Azure Storage does not natively support rename operation. The way Cerulean accomplishes this is by copying the existing file to a new file with the new name and then deleting the original file.

In case of folder renaming, Cerulean will list the files recursively in the folder. Once the files are listed, it first tries to create a folder by the new name and then it copies the existing file to a new file with the new name. Once the copy is complete, Cerulean simply deletes the old file. Once all files in the folder are copied to another folder, it simply deletes the source folder.

Using Cerulean you can manage lease on a file. Lease protects a file from accidental deletes and updates.

You can acquire an infinite lease on a file. If you know the lease id of the lease on a file, then you can either change the lease (to get a new lease id) or release a lease all together. You can also break a lease on a file and make it available for modification immediately.

Using Cerulean you can upload local files and folders from your local computer to a file share.

You can select one or more files from your local computer and upload them. You can also select one or more folders from your local computer and upload them. You can drag files and folders from your local computer and drop them either on share node or in file viewer grid to upload them.

In Cerulean local files and folders are uploaded via a background task.

The benefit of uploading happening via a background task is that your UI is not impacted at all and you can continue to work in the UI without any sluggishness. Another major benefit of uploading via background task is that you can close the application and the background task can continue. You don't have to keep the application running while the upload process is running.

You can monitor the progress of the upload tasks by going into the task manager in the application. You can also cancel the upload task. Furthermore if a file fails to upload because of network issue, you can retry uploading that file from the task manager itself.

Cerulean uploads the files and folders in parallel. It smartly detects how many parallel operations should be running and uploads the files in parallel. In case of large file uploads where a file is split into chunks for uploading, even the chunks are uploaded in parallel. This enables much faster uploads.

Large files are uploaded by splitting the file in smaller chunks and uploading those chunks. Chunks are uploaded in parallel. This result in faster upload of large files.

Furthermore you're in control of the chunk size. This gives you great benefit when you're on a poor network connection as you can reduce the chunk size.

Assuming you're uploading HTML, CSS, JS, and image files for your website in file storage and would want them to be stored in compressed format in file storage using either GZIP or DEFLATE compression algorithm.

Cerulean can do this work for you. All you need to do is tell the extensions of the file names (e.g. .css, .js etc.) that you wish to compress before uploading and the compression algorithm (GZIP or DEFLATE) to use and Cerulean does the job of compressing the files and uploading them. While uploading compressed file, it automatically sets the content encoding property of the file to either "gzip" or "deflate" based on the compression algorithm. Furthermore, if Cerulean detects that the compressed file size is more than the original file size, it picks up the original file instead of compressed one.

You can instruct Cerulean to calculate MD5 hash of the file that is being uploaded and save that MD5 hash as "Content-MD5" HTTP property of the uploaded file.

Uploading process in Cerulean is quite flexible. Other than the settings descibed above like deciding the chunk size, compression settings etc.), you can control the overwrite behavior i.e. what Cerulean should do in case it finds a file by the same name as that of the local file. You can instruct Cerulean to either overwrite the file or not overwrite it.

Using Cerulean you can download one or more files and/or folders from a file share to your local computer. You can also download an entire file share as well to your local computer.

In Cerulean files, folders and file share are downloaded via a background task.

The benefit of downloading happening via a background task is that your UI is not impacted at all and you can continue to work in the UI without any sluggishness. Another major benefit of downloading via background task is that you can close the application and the background task can continue to run. You don't have to keep the application running while the download process is running.

You can monitor the progress of the download tasks by going into the task manager in the application. You can also cancel the download task. Furthermore if a file fails to download because of network issue, you can retry downloading that file from the task manager itself.

Cerulean downloads the files in parallel. It smartly detects how many parallel operations should be running and downloads the files in parallel. In case of large file download, a file is split into chunks for downloading and then these chunks are downloaded in parallel. This enables much faster downloads.

When downloading large files, Cerulean automatically splits the file in smaller chunks and then download those chunks. These chunks are downloaded in parallel. This results in faster downloads.

If a file is compressed with GZIP or DEFLATE compression algorithm i.e. file's content encoding is set as either "gzip" or "deflate", you can instruct Cerulean to automatically decompress it after download. You don't have to do anything special to decompress that file.

This is another neat feature in Cerulean where you can instruct Cerulean to set the date/time of the downloaded file to be that of the storage file's last modified date/time instead of current date/time of the system.

Using Cerulean you can configure storage analytics settings for the file service in your storage account.

You can configure (view/update) minute metrics and hourly metrics settings for the file service in your storage account. Please note that logging settings are not available for file service.

Using Cerulean you can configure CORS settings for the file service in your storage account.

Using Cerulean you can list the CORS rules defined for the file service, add new CORS rule, update existing CORS rules or delete CORS rules.