A (small) filesystem stored in the browser's LocalStorage
If you're writing a client-side app, you may want to give the user a virtual filesystem in which to store the data they create in the app. Users are accustomed to files and folders, so this provides them.
Note that this project does not provide any UI; it is exclusively the backend. Present lists of files and folders to your user in whatever UI your project already uses.
The goal is to have this tool work in any browser, which is why it uses LocalStorage. (IndexedDB does not work in Mobile Safari and is not actually persistent in Chrome.) Thus we create a filesystem in LocalStorage, which has a maximum size of 5MB (or 2.5MB, depending on the browser). So far I've only run the test suite in desktop Chrome.
If you're looking for something that can handle more than 5MB, you should try filer.js instead, but it is based on IndexedDB, with the limitations listed above.
Download the JavaScript code or the minified version and import them into your page the usual way.
<script type="text/javascript" src="jsfs.min.js"></script>Alternately, you can use a CDN.
<script src='https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/nathancarter/jsfs@1/release/jsfs.min.js'></script>Create a filesystem object with whatever name you like. You can have multiple (completely separate) filesystems under different names, in case you have multiple apps on your site. (LocalStorage is shared across a domain.)
var F = new window.FileSystem( "The user's documents" );Read and write any JSON-serializable objects into the filesystem you like.
F.write( "tps_report.txt", reportObject );
// ... later ...
var reloaded = F.read( "tps_report.txt" );You can create and navigate a hierarchy of folders with the functions listed below. They are links to the source code, which is written in a literate language, so it's documentation, too.
You can turn on and off data compression with an optional third parameter to
the write and append functions, or just set a default for all write
operations with F.compressionDefault = true (or false). (Compression
will only work if the webpage defines the global LZString object, as
provided by this project.)
$ git clone https://github.com/nathancarter/jsfs.git
$ cd jsfs
$ npm install
$ ./node_modules/.bin/cake all
If you'd like to contribute, please let me know so that we can talk about the changes first. I'm glad to accept pull requests, of course. Note that they will need to come with corresponding additions to the unit tests, which appear here.
- tests/index.html
- tests/class-spec.litcoffee
- tests/instance-spec.litcoffee
- tests/compression-spec.litcoffee
If you plan to extend the API in any way, be sure to update this README as well, so that there are links into the appropriate portions of the source code, documenting your new functions.