Open amake opened 3 years ago
@hpoul Would it help if I broke this PR up into smaller ones?
I have been actively using this branch in my app for years now. I will continue to maintain it. I just mention this to note that I am merging other, smaller PRs into it so if you ever do feel like looking at this one, I suggest you merge the others first.
~Note: This PR includes the changes in #19, so you might want to review that one first.~
This PR addresses #16 by adding the following functions:
FilePickerWritable.openDirectory
FilePickerWritable.getDirectory
FilePickerWritable.resolveRelativePath
FilePickerWritable.isDirectoryAccessSupported
Please see the dartdoc comments of each for details.
To represent the result of picking a directory or resolving a relative path to a directory, I have introduced the
DirectoryInfo
class. Because the result ofresolveRelativePath
could be either a file or a directory, I have moved the bulk ofFileInfo
into a new abstract classEntityInfo
from which bothFileInfo
andDirectoryInfo
inherit (both classes have the same properties for now). See https://github.com/hpoul/file_picker_writable/issues/16#issuecomment-815359997 for additional discussion of this design decision.Android details
Android only supports obtaining persistable directory access on API 21 (Android 5 "Lollipop") and later, but this plugin supports back to API 19. I have maintained compatibility with this PR; users are expected to use
isDirectoryAccessSupported
to check if directory access is supported before calling any of the other new functions.Another wrinkle is that one of the core primitives required to implement
getDirectory
(and resolve..
inresolveRelativePath
),DocumentsContract#findDocumentPath
, is only available on API 26 (Android 8 "Oreo"). To supportgetDirectory
on prior OSes I implemented a potentially very costly breadth-first recursive search through the filesystem. It works, but the experience could be quite poor if the user has a lot of files, or if the root is far removed from the target file.(On Android 7 and earlier you currently can't resolve
..
above your start point. This could be improved, but I'm not sure how to make the API clear enough to be usable.)Android URIs
To make sense of the Android implementation you need to know the following about Android Storage Access Framework URIs.
There are three kinds of URI that we care about:
content://com.android.externalstorage.documents/document/primary%3ADocuments%2Ffoo%bar.txt
Documents/foo/bar.txt
inprimary
storageDocuments/foo/bar.txt
content://com.android.externalstorage.documents/tree/primary%3ADocuments
Documents
inprimary
storageDocuments
content://com.android.externalstorage.documents/tree/primary%3ADocuments/document/primary%3ADocuments%2Ffoo%bar.txt
Documents/foo/bar.txt
under the directory treeDocuments
, both inprimary
storageDocumentsContract
Much of the code in the Android implementation concerns itself with the manipulation such URIs:
The above example URIs are taken from the local storage provider. While you can dissect and make sense of the parts of these URIs, so you might be tempted to try parsing them for easier manipulation, please note that there are various exhortations against doing so in the Android documentation:
(source)
Compatibility
Unfortunately directory access is not widely supported by third-party apps. The only sources that work are:
Apps confirmed to not support directory access include Dropbox, Google Drive, and FileBrowser.
Intended use case
I have implemented these features for use in my app, Orgro, which is a viewer for Org Mode files. My use case is:
isDirectoryAccessSupported
returns false then we quit heregetDirectory
is called to get an identifier for the directory containing the opened fileresolveRelativePath
readFile
methodopenDirectory
I have this implemented and tested on iOS 14, Android 11, and Android 6.