677001 - Choosing a different download folder

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Dumitru Gherman [:dumitru]]

Right now, when downloading a file in Fennec, it is automatically saved in /sdcard/Download.
I think it would be good to have an "advanced" setting similar to the one existing in the desktop version of Firefox, where you can choose either a different location for all the downloads or have Fennec always ask you where to save those files.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Sounds like extension material to me. You can set this using the browser.download.dir pref in about:config. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Download_Manager_preferences

Comment 5

[Zafar]

So should I go ahead and fix it?

Comment 6

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

To fix this I think we'd have to write some sort of Dir-chooser since there isn't one built into Android and there's not even a standard intent to launch one if the user did have one installed. Our nsIFilePicker implementation just ignores modeGetFolder right now:

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/nsIFilePicker.idl#32

so technically fixing this would also be fixing that (and that might get better traction than writing one just for this one bug).

We might be able to write a dir picker in JS using prompt.jsm. I'm not exactly sure how we'd handle selecting a dir vs opening a dir to select a subfolder inside in the dialog though.

Comment 7

[Zafar]

Hi Wesley. I am new to Firefox, would I be able to take this on? Which bug are you referring to (ie which ignores modeGetFolder)? 
After our chat I am looking at how to start using prompt.jsm.

Comment 8

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

Sure. This won't be an easy first bug though. You'll be fixing our implementation of the nsIFilePicker component to support picking a dir. i.e. this init method of the File Picker:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM/Reference/Interface/nsIFilePicker#init%28%29

can take a modeGetFolder argument:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/nsIFilePicker.idl#32

Fennec's implementation of this is here:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/components/FilePicker.js#29

Note, we throw in there if you specify modeGetFolder right now, so you'll have to undo that. We don't do anything with it until you call show():

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/components/FilePicker.js#167

right now that sends a message to Java, which is picked up and handled by FilePicker.java and FilePickerResultHandler.java:

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/base/FilePicker.java#72
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/base/FilePickerResultHandler.java#72

If you wanted to use Prompt.jsm, you should probably just jump out of show() into a separate (new) _showDirPicker() function in FilePicker.jsm.

Prompts can show lists using setSingleChoiceItems. You might use that to show a list of folders (and maybe a "Go up one folder" row to go up a row? In order to support "Opening" vs "Selecting", we could try multiple buttons? That doesn't feel like great UX to me but it might be a good start here for a seldom used feature. i.e. We can make it better from there.

For instance, this dir picker: http://bgreco.net/directorypicker/ just has one "Pick this dir" button. Tapping the rows opens subfolders. We could try something like that, but right now JS doesn't know when you tap a row, so we'd have to improve Prompt.jsm to send that callback. That's complex enough, it should be a separate bug.

Comment 9

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

I think it might be better to implement an activity to handle the ACTION_GET_CONTENT intent in Fennec with some sort of mime-type for folders. Then the existing ACTION_GET_CONTENT code could be re-used. The activity we write could also be exposed to other apps and/or the mime type for folders could be standardized leading to more unification down the line.

Comment 10

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(see also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1038880#c20)

Comment 11

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Note also bug 846931 seems to be picking up steam, so we might want to get ahead of the curve and implement that too as part of this.

Comment 12

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

True. Just worried that's a rabbit hole (for instance, on KitKat we'd eventually want to try and support the new Documents stuff if we can...). But we could write something really simple that just launched a transparent activity and did what I mentioned above (i.e. show an AlertDialog in NativeJava code). Do you know/want to write some Android code here? The nice thing is, there isn't any hurry :)

Alternatively, we could try to find some third party code to ship. There are lots of dir picker widgets that show up in a search, but they all look kinda awful to me.

Comment 17

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

check this file org.mozilla.gecko.DownloadsIntegration#getTemporaryDownloadDirectory
and see related Javascript

Comment 19

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

I don't believe we need to have a dirpicker for this.

Other browsers simply have a preference in settings as to where the download goes by default, and you can change that.

See:

https://bug1342728.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8841398


Trying to build a file picker is definitely a rabbit hole.

Incidentally, this has moved up in priority from our partners because it's needed if you are to become the system browser.

I suggest we focus on providing a simple preference especially given that dirpickers are being worked on in bug 1188880

Comment 20

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Firefox for Android supports setting a custom folder via about:config set browser.download.folderList to 2 and browser.download.dir to a valid linux path example /storage/emulated/0/test

It would take someone to build a UI for this and plumb the parts into the config settings. Some consideration should be given to sanitizing the user input. If the user gets a text input then they may enter a path that Firefox does not have access to write to such as /data/data or input some difficult to deal with strings such as non printing characters or emoji.

Comment 21

[alex_mayorga]

¡Hola!

Ended up here via https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1210255

Setting flags accordingly FWIW.

¡Gracias!
Alex

Comment 24

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