[SharedCache] Confusing experience opening DSC database when the DSC files cant be located

[WeiN76LQh]

Version and Platform (required):

• Binary Ninja Version: 5.0.7218-dev (c480ce0c)
• OS: macOS
• OS Version: 15.2
• CPU Architecture: M1

Bug Description:
When opening a DSC database in a project and the DSC files cannot be found, the user experience is confusing and its not clear what the user is being asked to open. Also the open file dialog is the OS one not the Binary Ninja project file browser one.

Steps To Reproduce:
Please provide all steps required to reproduce the behavior:

1. Create a new project.
2. Copy all the DSC files into a folder in that project.
3. Open the DSC.
4. Save the database into a different top level folder in the project to the one with the DSC files in it.
5. Close the binary view.
6. Open the database in the project.
7. Observe that the user is prompted to open a file using the OS file browser and no information is provided to explain what they should be opening. Additionally it should not be the OS file browser but the project file browser that Binary Ninja provides for opening files in a project.

Expected Behavior:
It should be clear to the user what is happening (the plugin can't find the related DSC files) and when being asked to find a file in a project the user should be provided with a project file browser not an OS one because the names of the files on disk for projects are hard to relate to actual files in the project due to their random names.

Additional Information:
This behaviour might be worse on macOS than other platforms due to the file dialogs not have text to indicate what the user should be opening.

[emesare]

I am going to add some more metadata to track the entries that were initially added to the shared cache, so that on subsequent loads of the database we can understand where to load the entries from, without having to worry about the original file path that binary ninja saves being overwritten.

That is to say, I believe the prompt you are getting is a little overzealous and we can do better to just not show it instead, with some specific metadata entries for the file name we can just do the lookup for you.

[emesare]

I went ahead and pushed what I believe to be the "fix" for this, because this is better (easier) to just show visually I am just going to attach a video.

Screen.Recording.2025-04-14.at.3.31.07.AM.mov

[emesare]

Oops, did not mean to close! Please let me know if the above is acceptable, atleast for the short term, like I mentioned above there is still more that can be done, but it is more cumbersome.

For the above it is available as of dev builds >7221.

[WeiN76LQh]

The fix works sufficiently for me, its clear what I need to do and there's a warning in the logs that indicates the issue. I agree that in the future using metadata to store the location of the DSC, particularly when its in a project, would be valuable. Additionally if anything ever moves and the user has to choose the primary DSC file again, the user should be asked if they want to store the new location in the metadata, as a way for them to update the DSC location in the metadata if they decide to move things around. I don't think thats urgent but I think it would be the best possible user experience that can be offered.

[emesare]

This issue provides some very much needed context for when the later improvements are done, so I am going to keep this issue open as a tracker for that, and move the issue to next release.