My chrome packaged app contains a PDF, and I would like to let the user view it. If I open it in the current frame I get the error "Chrome PDF Viewer is not Allowed".
Frankly, the chrome PDF viewer is pretty awful, so I'd rather let the user view it in their PDF viewer of choice anyway. If I disable the chrome PDF plugin (just as an experiment) and I try to open the PDF using chrome.app.window.open, it "downloads" the PDF, and then the user could open it. But this has two issues:
I can't realistically make the user go to chrome://plugins and do that disable
There isn't any browser window, so the user has no idea the download happened
Any suggestions? Opening PDFs that are embedded in my app is kind of a must-have feature for this app.
I've looked at this extensively, and have come to the conclusion that there's no way to get a Chrome App to open a PDF that's local. I, too, have tried data URIs.
I don't think the issue is the PDF support in the window, as it's still Chrome, or the size of the PDFs. Rather, I think it's just an engineering problem, one that might get solved someday.
As for me, I build the PDF in my Chrome App. Since I can't display it, and there's no server to upload it to, I write it to a file of the user's choosing and let the user deal with it on his/her own.
I've got this working, but whether it is a solution for you depends a lot on your use case. The solution has three parts:
Use pdfjs to do the actual rendering.
To get this running in a packaged app, you'd need to do some violence to the internationalization support. And even after you do that, you'll find that some PDFs refuse to load for no apparent reason whatsoever. So don't bother trying to make pdfjs work in a packaged app. Just:
Put your entire app into a <webview> with a persist partition, and use a HTML5 cache manifest to get all your files available for offline viewing.
Yeah, yeah, I know that cache manifests are not cool anymore. But if you can list all your files for use in a packaged app, then you are doing the one case where cache manifests actually work great.
Then use a packaged app to distribute a tiny wrapper around your page with the webview in it.
You'll also get the benefit that you don't have to rewrite your app to live within the draconian packaged app rules (eval, sync xhr, 2GB limit, etc.).
You can see a working example at m.kaon.com/c/ka (visit with Chrome to get the desktop app; if you visit that with Firefox, you'll get access to a hosted app that is using the same tricks). PDFs are down in the bottom "Why Choose Kaon" section.
Related
This is an odd use-case and I've tried to steer the users away from this, but I have a request to load locally stored PPT files in an HTML environment.
The idea is to view the PPT in an iframe so that I can "decorate" all around it. Users will be creating playlists, of sorts, so I need to add "next" and "previous" presnetation buttons, etc.
I have an online version of this working using the Office webapp link that many other posts have shared, but there is a concern for poor connectivity so they want it to be available offline.
My instinct was to shape this up as a PWA. I can make them use Chrome, so I have the FileSystem API "caching" the PPT files from the online source. However, I have no way to render the saved files!
Because it's offline, I can't use googledocs or continue to MS web office.
I don't know the AppCache feature well enough, but wondered if I can preload all of the docs in an iframe, will it cache those. My thought is that it won't, because the content is on microsoft (or Google's) site.
All users will have a legal copy of PPT on the computer, if that helps at all.
So far I have tried storing the files using the filesystem API in combination with the Chrome offline viewer extension and alternatively the Native Docs extension. The Chrome one will allow me to open a doc, but directly in edit mode. I need to simulate the behavior of a ppsx file, but neither extension works with ppsx files and I don't see documentation for an API that will allow me to "auto-play" the presentations.
Thanks for any ideas!
Wayne
We are currently looking at porting a enterprise silverlight application over to html5. The major roadblock that we have hit is the ability to open files from the user's local disk. Currently they have a document library which just links to files on their computer that they can open from within the app and view or print out. All that I read is that you can only access the local sandbox of the web app with the html5 file api's. We want to load these files from code.
Does anyone know of any workarounds to this?
Thanks
There is no way for html5 to access local file without user selection. But FSO: FileSystemObject works for IE and MAYBE could be regarded as a work around. But still there are some requirements to meet.
It is possible to use chrome's filesystem API to access files on a users local filesytem. So you'd have to be willing to make this a chrome only application.
Using java you can create a "Signed" applet which has access to the local filesystem. (if the applet is signed you can request filesystm permissions)
then there is a tutorial for accessing methods of your java code directly from javascript here: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/invokingAppletMethodsFromJavaScript.html
you should be able to perform something similar from silverlight.
There is no workaround in pure HTML5/Javascript. You need the use of plugins, such as Java or Silverlight (maybe you shouldn't port it after all). As for workarounds, HTML5 gives you an easy way drag and drop multiple files that you could transfer on the server and then display back to your users. Another workaround would be to install a custom agent (a software with only a tray icon) that would send the information about the current user "document library" to server and then again, you could display it back to the user.
Note: I've heard somewhere that browsers will eventually stop supporting plugins. http://www.howtogeek.com/179213/why-browser-plug-ins-are-going-away-and-whats-replacing-them/
Ya, I agree with Markain. However, if you were to limit your audience solely to chrome users, I daresay, you would most likely use some of your users. If Huazhihao is right, then your number of leaving customers should decrease but users who regularly use firefox won't be happy. Overall, I think that this will not work. Otherwise, there would be too many websites that trashed your hard driver (or at least wherever you have the rights to edit/delete files). I think it would be best if your product was setup to synchronize the file whenever an internet connection was detected and a change was made to the file. That way the user would not need to visit the website whenever the file was uploaded. If this is some kind of an error file, then it would be most beneficial if you were to make a link in the application that when clicked, would upload the file to the website and the website were to do whatever was necessary. If this is a purely online thing, then I don't see what business you would have looking through other peoples' files =-). Hope I helped!
I'm working on a web application that needs to have a link which opens a documents folder from a file server. The folder can be opened either in a new browser tab or new window, or using the computer's default file browser program (i.e. Windows Explorer). This javascript should do the trick:
window.open('file://///fileserver.companyname/public/Documents/','_blank);
and this html should also work:
Open Documents
but these both only work in Internet Explorer, and our users always use Firefox and Chrome. Apparently the default security settings for Firefox and Chrome don't let you open a "file://" when the request is called from an "http://" website.
I've seen several references to this page: Links to local pages do not work which describes why you can't open files from webpages using Firefox and offers a few workarounds. Unfortunately, it only offers two options: install a plug-in on each browser instance, or create a user preferences file for each browser instance. Neither of these options are acceptable because we have too many users. The company I work for is not willing to apply anything to each machine which needs to access this link. Aside from that, I tried both plug-ins and the preferences file anyway, and the only one that worked for me was the IE Tab plug-in. I think the reason LocalLinks didn't work is because I'm trying to open a folder, not a file.
This stackoverflow question described similar options for Chrome: Can Google Chrome open local links? but again, the LocalLinks plug-in didn't work for me and plug-ins aren't acceptable anyway.
I also found a website that suggested to use a command line argument top open files in Chrome (http://www.askyb.com/chrome/open-local-file-in-google-chrome/) and one that showed how to apply the argument automatically (https://askubuntu.com/questions/160245/making-google-chrome-option-allow-file-access-from-files-permanent), but if I read it correctly it still involves applying changes to every computer accessing our website.
Is there any way to open a file folder in both Firefox and Chrome entirely programmatically i.e. within my web application C# or Javascript code without installing a plug-in or adding a preferences file to individual computers? I cannot alter any of these business requirements.
Sidenote: We are using C# with MVC 4. I would prefer to open the folder using a Controller Action in C# (because I'd like to create the folder before opening it if it doesn't exist yet), but javascript or html on the client side is acceptable. For Internet Explorer, I can create that javascript in the C# code by wrapping it in the JavaScript( ... ) function built into MVC C# Controllers. When testing IE Tabs in Firefox and Chrome, I had to define it as an href link, not a function that opens a window, or IE Tabs wouldn't recognize it as a link. But neither of these were acceptable workarounds for our business needs.
The request was dropped before I could come up with a feasible solution, but in case anyone else is still struggling with this problem I will describe workaround that would not require any workstation customization.
They don't technically need to use the built-in file explorer to open a folder. Instead, a creative way to display the information the business wanted without breaking any browser security rules would be to iterate though the files without opening the file explorer and then display a list of folders/files in a browser window.
Using Directory.EnumerateDirectories(filepath) and Directory.EnumerateFiles(filepath) you can get a list of folders and files to display. When the user clicks one of the folders, call these methods again to get the next level of folders and filenames. When the user clicks a file, download/open it. These methods return the folder and file names as lists of strings, so you would just need to render the lists with custom icons in the browser. (The methods are from C#'s System.IO library.)
here is the simple html code:
<input type="file" webkitdirectory>
but the problem with this code is that it works only on google!
I am currently creating a Chrome extension (which uses javascripts mainly) that allows users to scrape the images on a webpage and download them. I have finished the link scraping part, and the code will return an array like:
["http://example.com/image1.jpg","http://example.com/image2.jpg"]
But how do I download all of the links in ONE CLICK? I tried listing all photos on a new tab and let the users to Ctrl+S save the page. But this greatly affects the UI and I do not like it. I do not host webpage so server side script may not be working.. Any other solutions?
As far as I know, Chrome extensions technically can't save files to disk like Firefox.
The only way to do this is using NPAPI
Unfortunately, extensions using npapi will most likely not be accepted by the Web Store due to security problems. Of course it'll be okay if you use it for yourself or host the extension on your website.
You can install and examize the code of the following extensions, maybe you can even use the provided npapi too:
Screen Capture (by Google) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cpngackimfmofbokmjmljamhdncknpmg
Chrome Toolbox (by Google) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fjccknnhdnkbanjilpjddjhmkghmachn
Awesome Screenshot: Capture & Annotate https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alelhddbbhepgpmgidjdcjakblofbmce
Download Asisstant (by Google) - got killed I guess.
I have a web app (sencha/phonegap) that includes a feature allowing users to click on buttons that link to Wikipedia articles. This obviously works fine if the device has internet access, but I get numerous requests to make the app work when the app is offline too. To accomplish this, I'd like to give the user the option to download the linked articles/webpages for offline access. When the device does not have internet access, the app would instead display the saved version (which might be stale/out-of-date, but is better than nothing). What are possible ways to accomplish this task?
My first thought was to somehow use the html manifest to cache the pages in the phone's browser, which sounds possible on the Android browser, but iOS apparently has a 5MB browser cache limit - too small.
My next thought was to save the needed html & associated files and bundle them up inside the app. But this seems a rather cumbersome approach, the app becomes much larger than it needs to be, and the webpages are stale back to the date the app was installed.
Using javascript, is it possible to download webpages, which I could then save (on the sd card, for example) for access later?
Or is there a more elegant approach?
If anyone could point me in the right direction it would be much appreciated.
In pure Javascript you can make an Ajax request to download a page. Then you can use the FileWriter to write the responseText to a file on the file system. However, that won't help you when it comes to images. You'll need to use the FileTransfer.download() command to get the binary image files.
If I were you I'd:
Use AJAX to download the html.
Parse the html looking for images.
Use FileTransfer.download to get the images.