In QT3 there was a very nice way to create new protocols and register them. This was very useful, for example, to change the way that a FileDialog displays its dir listings.

I had created a new protocol, called "sequence" that allowed me to pass different current directories to a file dialog:

file://path/to/file.0001.jpg
vs.
sequence://path/to/file.#.jpg

I have directories with thousands of video frames in them, all numbered:

file.0001.jpg
file.0002.jpg
...
file.9998.jpg
file.9999.jpg
image.0001.png
...
image.1234.png

there may be multiple frame sequences in a dir, so I had an algorithm to collapse the sequences into a shorter notation:

file.[1-9999]#.jpg
image.[1-1234]#.jpg

this is much easier to read and cleaner when doing video work.

The beauty of it was that all I had to do was pass a different protocol:// to the dialog to switch between the notations!

Now, in QT4, the network protocol has been deprecated to Q3NetworkProtocol, and I don't want to use it if it's going to be removed in the future. This is a real bummer, because now I may be forced to build a new QFileDialog object just to list files in this way.

An additional thing that the protocol would have accomodated would have been a machine name at the beginning of the path... I have a file server (which I wrote) running on certain machines, and clients can request dir listings from each server (via a main dispatching caching server).

Bottom line is, I wanted to be able to pass a starting protocol/path to a file dialog and be able to navigate around the directory tree, but the source of this information is not local, is not http or ftp, and NetworkProtocol does not seem to have a QT4 equivalent.

Is there a class with a similar "operationListChildren" that I can subclass to make this work?