w3c / w3c/FileAPI

Allow `createObjectURL` to retain filename from `File` (and similar) objects

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#203 7 comments 3 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
HTML
Stars
118
Forks
52
Avg merge
9d 16h
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

What problem are you trying to solve?

We have a datastore that requires authentication to retrieve files (e.g. PDF, CSV, ZIP, PNG, or some Office suite file format) -- it has a file name, a content type, and data. We'd like to allow users to click a link (or button/...) and have the "file" corresponding to that data (which we currently retrieve in a Blob) open in their browser (or download depending on how the browser is feeling) and if at some point the browser decides to save the file (e.g. because the user asks to save a file, or because it doesn't have an internal handler) then we'd like it to favor our proposed filename instead of a blob id.

What solutions exist today?
  1. We can construct a Blob or a File w/ a Blob and call createObjectURL with it.
  2. We can create an anchor a with a#download with the href set the the url from createObjectURL such that users can click the anchor to get our suggested filename.
  3. We can add an iframe containing our blob url

Fwiw, Microsoft had an msSaveBlob which included a defaultName field...

How would you solve it?

Change the specification for createObjectURL so that for objects that have a name (e.g. File), browsers should prefer that name over the blob when saving.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading the File API specification around the createObjectURL entry point and the definitions of File, Blob, and object URLs. Determine how a proposed filename should interact with saving behavior, then update the specification to define that preference and add or adjust conformance coverage if the specification identifies a relevant test location.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
html
Domain
api, web-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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