The ability of programs to access and manipulate files and folders residing in different file systems is an essential part of enterprise applications. NOV implements a cross-platform API for working with different types file systems. This abstracts your application from the actual file system it is working with, and makes it possible to seamlessly access local, in-memory and cloud resources with the same API.

The File System API of NOV is built around the following main classes:

• NFile - provides properties and methods for working with files, i.e. creating, renaming, reading, writing, deleting files and so on.
• NFolder - provides properties and methods for working with folders, i.e. creating, renaming, deleting, scanning folders and so on.
• NPath - provides useful methods for working with file paths.

Each NFile and NFolder object is connected to an instance of the NFileSystem class. In this way the NFile and NFolder methods implementation is handled by a specified file system. In this way NOV applications are abstracted from the actual file systems they are working with, which makes it possible to manipulate and access files not only on the local file system, but also on file systems located in the cloud. See the File Systems topic for more information.

Additionally the NApplication static class exposes a set of root NFolder instances. NOV applications use them to load resource, save/load settings for the current and all users etc. You can alter these folders, if you want your application to read/write a specific resource from a different location.