Ionic 2 File Plugin usage examples

Question

Does anyone have complete examples about how to use the Cordova Native File Plugin in a Ionic 2/Angular 2 project?

I installed this plugin but the documentation don't seems to make much sense to me due the fact it is fragmented and lacks of a complete example, including all needed imports.

For example, the following example don't shows where objects like LocalFileSystem or window came from.

window.requestFileSystem(LocalFileSystem.PERSISTENT, 0, function (fs) {

    console.log('file system open: ' + fs.name);
    fs.root.getFile("newPersistentFile.txt", { create: true, exclusive: false }, function (fileEntry) {

        console.log("fileEntry is file?" + fileEntry.isFile.toString());
        // fileEntry.name == 'someFile.txt'
        // fileEntry.fullPath == '/someFile.txt'
        writeFile(fileEntry, null);

    }, onErrorCreateFile);

}, onErrorLoadFs);

For example, I need to crate a property file. First I need to check if a file exists on app sandbox storage area, if don't exists I must create it. Then I must open the file write data and save it . How could I do that?

Answer 1

Here is an example using IonicNative for an app I am working on where I want to send an email with a csv file attachment.

import {EmailComposer} from '@ionic-native/email-composer';
import {File} from '@ionic-native/file';

class MyComponent {
 constructor(private emailComposer: EmailComposer, private file: File) {

 }
 testEmail() {
 this.file.writeFile(this.file.dataDirectory, 'test.csv', 'hello,world,', {replace: true})
     .then(() => {      
       let email = {
         to: 'email@email',
         attachments: [
           this.file.dataDirectory + 'test.csv'
         ],

         subject: 'subject',
         body: 'body text...',
         isHtml: true
       };
       this.emailComposer.open(email);

     })
     .catch((err) => {
       console.error(err);
     });

 }
}

This was tested with ionic 3.7.0 on IOS.

Answer 2

Ionic 2 comes with a Cordova file plugin wrapper: http://ionicframework.com/docs/v2/native/file/.

The necessary file system paths (e.g. cordova.file.applicationDirectory) you can find here at the documentation of the original plugin: https://github.com/apache/cordova-plugin-file#where-to-store-files. Note that not all platforms support the same storage paths.

I even managed to build a file browser with it. Use it like so:

import {Component} from '@angular/core';
import {File} from 'ionic-native';

...

File.listDir(cordova.file.applicationDirectory, 'mySubFolder/mySubSubFolder').then(
  (files) => {
    // do something
  }
).catch(
  (err) => {
    // do something
  }
);