I have been doing a lot of research and have been unable to find an answer to my exact question. I understand that having a google chrome extension that can write to local user files would be a major security breach and thankfully isn't possible. However in my extension is a .json file that is used to make a HTML webpage with links via JavaScript. The JS reads the .json file and inserts the lines of code on the html page. I am attempting to make a user interface that allows them to update and edit the .json file that is inside the extension in order to add new lines of code to the webpage, but have been unable to find anything that could make this work due to security issues. I was thinking that since the file is in the extension users should be able to modify it.
If that was confusing here is a flow of what I want to happen and where it is not working:
Works:
Users clicks on button that takes them to a webpage hosted in the extension -> when page is loaded, the javascript runs -> the JS looks at a .json file in the extension using an XMLHttpRequest, parses the data, and then inserts it into the html -> The user now see's the content that was contained in the .json file on the html page.
Doesn't work:
After this I would like to have an interface that will allow the user to edit this .json file in order to update the page as they see fit, all in the extension itself.
If it was just me using this extension I could simply use the chrome storage api's available, however this is for my team at work, who are wanting to make edits as we need. Which means we will all be editing the same .json file.
Any information regarding this would be very beneficial. Even if it's as simple as it can't be done. Either way manually editing the .json file without a simple UI is much easier than editing the html directly.
Thanks in advance!
Posts/Articles I have looked at regarding this question:
Access Local Files using a Google Chrome Extension
https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/storage
Local file access with javascript
Allow Google Chrome to use XMLHttpRequest to load a URL from a local file
Related
Is there a way to replace a .js file in the website sources with a file on my workstation, or make a modification to a .js file and refresh the website to see the changes?
I am developing client-side JavaScript code against a SharePoint website on a server. I cannot create a local version of the website, so I need to modify the script, save the file to the server, refresh, etc. I do not have direct access to the server, and saving a file in a SP doc library or web part takes a lot of time between edits.
I can make small modifications using the dev tools while breaking on certain lines and applying snippets, but I am hoping for a better way.
Thanks!
If you have access the server that's hosting the file you should be able to replace or modify the JS file. Alternately you can use local hosting tools to test your file and then upload it to the server once you've confirmed it's working.
If you explain what you level of access to your host is we can offer better suggestions.
I am developing a tab pane app in Excel which needs to read the current document. In Word, the Office JavaScript API has the method Office.context.document.getFileAsync(), but this is not available in Excel.
I can get the URL of the document with Office.context.document.getFileProperties(), and then I thought I could read the file with this.
I tried using the HTML5 FileReader() object, but this only works for files selected from the file input control. I tried manipulating a hidden file input control so it automatically uses the current document, but JavaScript understandably prevents you from doing this for security reasons. I could ask the user to browse to the document they are currently using but that would be a poor user experience.
So I tried using ActiveXObject('Scripting.FileSystemObject') but ActiveX is not allowed in tab pane apps at all, whatever the current security setting are in IE.
What other options do I have?
According to the API road map, Office.context.document.getFileAsync() is not available in Excel at this moment.
I don't think it's feasible by using getFilePropertiesAsync(). It only returns the URL. Usually browser forbids developer touching any content in the file system. Therefore, it's hard to access the local file system in JavaScript code.
Besides, the file may not be in local file system. For example, it could be hosted in Onedrive or SharePoint. getFilePropertiesAsync() should return its real URL in Onedrive/SharePoint, instead of local file system.
I guess Microsoft will support getFileAsync() in the future.
I'm trying to load information from a .xml file (located in a .kmz archive) into the description of a placemark using javascript. The goal is to display the information from the .xml file in an html table in the description. I've gotten everything working, with the exception that I can't seem to access the .xml file from the .kml file. I'm trying to use an XMLHttpRequest() to load the file from the .kmz. It works just fine as an html file, but when i put the html/javascript into a description tag of the .kml, nothing loads at all.
Does anyone know if this is even possible to do? If so, how? If not, any other suggestions?
Thanks in advance for the help!
Is this using the Google Earth API? If so, note that script tags, amongst others, are stripped out by default. You can work around this if needed as described at https://developers.google.com/earth/documentation/balloons#getballoonhtmlunsafe
If this is KML being loaded into the Google Earth client, javascript is allowed (with the exception of things like alerts which bring up a browser dialog).
However it's quite possible, for example if you are loading a separate KMZ in your XHR request, amongst a variety of other reasons, that you're getting a cross domain error (basically because you'll be loading a local file with file:// versus http://). To test this, I would recommend hosting the XML on a server somewhere, and trying to see if that works.
If so, but it does not work locally, please paste a link to your KMZ, or at least paste your main KML within the KMZ, and the associated file structure within the KMZ.
I'm trying to create a web app based on ExtJS, and I'm working on the file-upload area of the app.
I want users to be able to upload files by copying and pasting them - not just copying and pasting the contents of the file, but the file itself. For example, in Windows, you can choose "Copy" or "Cut" from the Edit menu while a file is selected, then choose "Paste" later and copy or move the file - I'd like users to be able to upload files to my app in the Paste step, by just choosing Paste in their browser.
I've already tried HTML5's drag-and-drop API, but we don't want to use that - we want users to be able to copy/cut and paste files to upload their files (as long as they're smaller than 20 megabytes). If the user copies the path to their file and pastes that directly to the page, telling us where to find the file, that could also work.
Can anyone suggest a way to do this?
The thing is, that you're not able to access the clients filesystem with javascript. There is this new Filesystem API, but this just allows you to create a virtual sandboxed filesystem. I had the same problem, thought about it a while and came up with the following ideas.
Flash
Writing a Flash bridge which access the filesystem and let the javascript communicate with it via swliveconnect
Problem: Flash doesn't have filesystem access either.
Java applet
Same thing as Flash and again with LiveConnect
In my opinion this could work, but I didn't try it out, because my goal was to get filesystem access on a chromebook. And chromeOS doesn't support Java (at least without some hacking)
ActiveX
I also found some solutions with this. I gave up at the applet part so I didn't try this out either.
As Jared Farrish said, when you copy a file the os just saves the path to the file in the clipboard. Then if you receive the paste event on your webapp just get the string out of the clipboard and forward it to your file bridge.
I've seen that DropBox.com allows this to be done (in chrome- didn't seem to work in IE). I didn't do cut and paste specifically, but dragged files into a dropbox page from a local folder, and it uploaded the files. So, this doesnt directly answer your quesiton, but perhaps you can look at how this is done in their code.
Lets say for example i have an google search results page opened in a window or a tab in firefox.Is there a way i can retrieve the html code of that tab or window using javascript?
I suppose that the webpage html is saved temporarily somewhere in computer memory.
Can i load the webpage using memory saved address?
Is there a way for javascript to read html files saved in the same folder as the original?For example i have saved the webpage in a folder on my computer.If i create an html file inside the same folder does javascript consider the saved webpage as the same domain?
No, you most certainly can't do that unless you control both pages. This would be a huge security hole.
There is a custom search API which may help if you specifically want to do Google searches. It appears to have a JSONP implementation which should let you make a cross-domain request, but I haven't tried it out so I'm not sure how well it works.