The architecture of RAMADDA is centered around a Model/View paradigm. The core Repository is responsible for creating the Entry/Group objects and then passing them off to the appropriate View component (e.g., rss output handler, html output, etc.)

Given this, RAMADDA can be configured to also provide a view of the file system on the server. The site administrator can specify any number of directory paths. For each of these paths a synthetic Entry is created as a child of the top group. The ids of these entries are of the form: file:/the/dir/path

Now, there are just a few methods that the core repository has that create the Entry/Group objects. These methods look to see whether the given Entry id begins with "file:". If it does then the file path is checked against the configured set of file paths to ensure that the path is under the configured paths. (we wouldn't want to allow access to just anywhere on the server). The children of a file: Entry that is a directory are the subdirectories and files of that directory.