What should I add for a professional reference on my job app?

Program design: best way to reference stored files?

• Hello- I'm pretty new at programming, and I decided to build a movie management app that fits my very specific needs as a means of "learning by doing". At any rate, I have several hard drives full of movies (legally ripped from DVDs I own) sitting on a basement server. The movies are ripped into DVD folders (containing VOB and IFO files). The idea is to have an app that will pull up a list of movies from across several drives and computers, then, when a 'play' button is clicked, the local computer will launch VLC player and play the folder from the network (not a problem within VLC). The question I have is how to reference the movies. Because I will be using a tagging system to organize/search through my movies, I think a SQL database is in order. I'm assuming I can just reference a static file path in a SQL table to where the movie folder is stored, but is there a better way to do it? One that won't require manually editing SQL or using a script every time a movie is added or moved around? The adding of movies and/or file management is not something I'm planning on adding into the application. But, obviously those changes need to be visible in the app, through the SQL table. Would it be possible to run some kind of maintenance script that will note the locations of new or moved movies and add them to the app, which can then be tagged, etc. as desired? Thanks in advance. Let me know if you need any more information about my concept.

• Answer:

  mySQL databases are nice because you can put practically ANYTHING into them. I suggest if you are really going to write your own program, that you code a search function. This function will look for all files of a specific file type (say....VOB and IFO? Or at least the IFO so you can get the DVD info). Each one it finds should create a new entry into the SQL database (marking a new movie) and marking a new static address for the movie (which should be easy since the IFO will be in the same folder as the VOB). That way you don't even have to populate it yourself (which could take hours). If you can find where the DVD info is stored, you can even get the program to set the info in the SQL database so that it will also populate that (and let you see them when you browse through your library).