Glossary

📖 Glossary

Every page here tries to explain its own terms where it uses them. This one collects them in one place, for when a word turns up and you would rather look it up than read the page it belongs to. Where a term has a page of its own, the entry links to it.

Tip

TL;DR — A handful of words carry most of it. WebDAV is the protocol that turns a web server into a file store. The WebClient service is the Windows side of it. A mount is one drive letter pointing at one place in Nextcloud. A server identity is how Windows tells two logins to the same host apart. An app password is what you give NcDavTray instead of your Nextcloud login password, and Login Flow v2 is how the browser fetches one for you.

Term	What it means
AES-256-CBC	the encryption used for the password file in portable mode. The key comes from your passphrase, not from Windows, which is what lets a portable copy travel. See Security and privacy
App password	a password Nextcloud generates for one application. It can be revoked on its own, and your login password stays out of the picture. Log in with browser fetches one without that password ever being typed into NcDavTray; by hand it is Settings → Security → Devices & sessions. See Accounts and app passwords
Balloon	the small notification the tray icon pops up when something changes — and once a moment after every start, naming the version that is running. See The tray
DPAPI	Data Protection API, the Windows service that encrypts data for one user on one machine. Installed mode stores passwords through it, so a copied value is worthless to anybody else
DPI awareness	a program telling Windows that it scales its own window contents. Without it, Windows scales the finished window instead, and text on a high-resolution display turns blurry. NcDavTray declares it in its first lines, asking for per-monitor v2 and falling back to system-wide on older Windows, which is what keeps its windows, tray icons and status badges sharp when a laptop screen and an external monitor run at different scalings
Explorer label	the name Explorer shows next to the drive letter, in place of the bare network path
Federated Cloud Sharing	Nextcloud's server-to-server sharing: something shared on server A appears on server B. Server B fetches the content over WebDAV, and because the same switch governs both, the option that decides whether public shares are reachable over WebDAV sits in this section — its own wording says so in brackets. See Share links
files_lock	the Nextcloud app that adds manual file locking on the server side. See File locking
HKCU	HKEY_CURRENT_USER, the branch of the Windows registry belonging to the logged-in user. Installed mode keeps everything under HKCU\Software\NcDavTray
Installed mode	the copy in %LOCALAPPDATA%, with its configuration in the registry and its passwords under DPAPI. See Installation
Login Flow v2	the procedure the official Nextcloud clients use to obtain an app password, and what Log in with browser runs: the application asks the server for a login page of its own (POST /index.php/login/v2), you confirm it in a real browser, and the finished app password comes back to the application. Nextcloud specifies it in the developer manual. See Accounts and app passwords
Maintenance mode	a state a Nextcloud server can be put in, usually during an update: it answers, and says it is not serving. NcDavTray unmaps and waits rather than treating it as an error
Mapping	connecting a network path to a drive letter, so Explorer and every application treat it as a drive
Mount	one drive letter pointing at one place in Nextcloud, with everything that belongs to it: target, label, subfolder, status. See Mounts
OCS API	Open Collaboration Services, a REST API standardised through freedesktop.org and implemented by Nextcloud for everything WebDAV has no answer for: shares, users, server capabilities. Calls go to /ocs/v1.php/… or /ocs/v2.php/… and carry the header OCS-APIRequest: true. NcDavTray uses three endpoints of it: the folder tree behind the folder picker, the one that says which account a set of credentials belongs to, and the one that withdraws an app password when the last mount of an account is removed. Login Flow v2 is not one of them — it answers under /index.php/… and belongs to no API this entry describes. Nextcloud documents it in the developer manual, and the OCS API Viewer app shows what a given server offers
PBKDF2	the function that turns a passphrase into an encryption key. It is deliberately slow — 100 000 iterations here — so that guessing passphrases stays expensive
Portable mode	the self-contained copy in a folder you pick, configuration in a JSON file and passwords in an encrypted one. See Installation
Redirector	short for the WebDAV mini-redirector: the Windows component that makes a WebDAV server look like a network share. The WebClient service is what runs it. See WebClient service
REUSE	a specification for stating copyright and licence per file. The repository follows it, which is what the badge in the README reports
Server identity	the exact spelling of a host inside a UNC path. Windows keeps one login per identity, and NcDavTray can offer two per host — the reason a third login waits, while mounts signing in the same way share one. See Server identities
Share link	a public link somebody sent you, ending in /s/<token>. It needs no account of yours. See Share links
STA mode	single-threaded apartment, the COM threading model that windows and dialogs need: everything belonging to a window happens on the one thread that owns it. The shortcuts start PowerShell with -STA, and the script checks its own apartment state at startup and restarts itself that way if it was started differently — so this is nothing you have to arrange
Start trigger	a condition that makes Windows start a service on demand instead of at boot. When one is configured for WebClient, startup type Manual is enough. See WebClient service
Token	the random part at the end of a share link. It identifies the share, and it is all the mount stores of the link
Tray	the notification area next to the clock, where NcDavTray lives. See The tray
UAC	User Account Control, the Windows mechanism that lets a program run with ordinary rights until something explicitly asks for administrator rights, and then puts the consent prompt in front of it. The small shield on a button is the Windows convention for this one will ask, and NcDavTray carries it in exactly two places. In WebClient service on Apply changes, Start service and Restart service, because those settings live in the machine-wide part of the registry and the service belongs to the whole machine, not to you. In WebDAV cache on Start, because the cache directory sits in the profile of the LOCAL SERVICE account, which an ordinary process may not read — so the watcher runs as a small elevated helper, asked for once at the start; stopping it asks nothing. Everything else, all reading included, happens with your ordinary rights
UNC path	the \\server\share form Windows uses for network paths. A WebDAV one carries @ssl, as in \\cloud.example.com@ssl\…
Update check	the question whether the project has a release newer than the copy running, asked from the About box or once at startup. Answering it is all the check does — installing what it found is a second step, and one you confirm. See Updates
Watchdog	the loop that checks every mount, unmaps it when the server stops answering, and maps it again when the server is back. It is the reason the application exists
WebClient	the Windows service that provides WebDAV drives. It is old, its defaults are conservative, and the WebClient tuning tab makes them visible. See WebClient service
WebDAV	the HTTP extension that turns a web server into a file store. Nextcloud speaks it, Windows can mount it, and that combination is the whole idea of NcDavTray
WinForms	the Windows user-interface library the application is built on, part of .NET Framework and present on every Windows

Note

Numbers rather than words — 1219, 53, 1326 and the rest — are in Troubleshooting, with what each one means and what to do about it.