Some questions about HTML5 FileSystemAPI

Question

I'm a first time user, just in the initial stages figuring out if this is going to be useful for me, so forgive any naive questions. I'm using Google Chrome.

Here's my use case -
The user needs to store some information to my application(web based) which may include paths to some files on his system. When the user comes back to access this information via my application, he should be able to click on the links that point to these files on his local disk and open those files.

Now, we know that browsers will not allow this due to security concerns.

I had the following questions

The description for HTML5 FileSystemAPI says that this will allow us to access files from a "sandboxed" section of the users disk. Does that mean that the files that my user wants to read should only originate from a specific folder on his disk?

Do we get to decide what that location would be? File browser access to Chrome's sandboxed filesystems - i get the idea from this question that chrome decides that.

I would appreciate if someone could throw some light on this. Thanks guys.

Answer 1

AFAIK, the FileSystem API doesn't provide access to files outside the sandbox and the sandbox's location is imposed by the browser. You can use HTML5's File API to let the user upload data, and then store this data using the FileSystem API. However, I don't think this is what you want.

Unrestricted access to a user's filesystem is only possible through a Java applet or another plugin.