How to implement a file type based filesystem?

Question

I want to essentially make it so that you never need to unzip/unrar any files. Currently, I have a Dokan filesystem which can do it given a specific zip file but I wanted to know how I can make it apply to all files. Meaning, I want to be able to compile a program that has "fopen("test.zip/1.jpg", "rb");". I think that a Shell Extension would work for dynamically loading the file into the filesystem IF I were browsing in the shell explorer but that doesnt help me with the fopen example. Any ideas?

Answer 1

What you want to do can be used with help of file system filter driver, which would track directory enumeration requests and report directories in place of ZIP files. Then this driver would create virtual files and take the data from ZIP archives. Quite a lot of kernel-mode work, I should say. And file system filter driver is not a file system driver, so dokan won't help you at all.