[TYPO3-dev] FAL and EnableFields - suggestion for improvement

[André Spindler]

Hello,

in a fresh installation of TYPO3 CMS 6.2 there are no enable fields in 
FAL. This makes sense for most use cases.
But even the system extension filemetadata adds a field fe_groups. But 
only db table and TCA is changed.
So if use USE this system feature and expect it is already included, you 
get wrong.

Looking into the file repository this gets clear.
Method \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Resource\FileRepository::findByRelation() calls 
enableFields() for table sys_file_reference, but not for sys_file_metadata.
Adding this here would mean to add a third table here in the SELECT 
statement and an additional relation to be resolved. Due to performance 
reasons this should be avoided.
But what about introducing a signal here?
Just between compiling the SELECT statement and executing it?
In system extension filemetadata there could be added a slot then to 
extend the query to check the enable fields of the metadata.

At the moment this system feature (fe_groups) is nearly useless. If you 
need to check access restrictions on file level, you have to fetch all 
records by a sql query first. As enableFields just returns the finally 
where clause, you have to build up the list of groups for youself and 
run with php through all entries by checking them. And don't forget to 
discard unneeded entries to reduce memory usage. Perhaps at the and 
there is no single entry at all, but you have executed a lot of php code 
and used a lot of memory...

Regards,
André Spindler