I am working on a webpage to provide download link to a searched file from the input form from user thru webpage.
I can use the html <a> tag as in <a href="file://ip/path/filename> link</a>
But when the file is in a network require login, i cannot do it.
Following is not working.
i had tried link
the file i need to link is locate at different network location based on user input to the browser form. then the backend python will search the file location.
can anybody give me a help ?
thank you.
Unfortunately, you are trying to do something which protocols and browsers do not support.
The username:password in URLs are designed to be consumed by a Web server. When you insert them in file URIs, there is nothing that will consume them; there's no HTTP server on the other end. Hence, the browser actually strips those before it extracts the file path from the request, and passes the file request to the OS.
You need to either make sure that the end-users are preauthenticated to all the network shares you are going to access, or avoid file URIs and set rudimentary web servers at your file targets.
Related
I am trying to rename a file when downloading it from <a> tag.
Here a simple example:
Download Stackoverflow Logo
As you can see, it never downloads the file with stackoverflow.png name, it does with default name though.
Nevertheless, if I download the image and tried to do the same with a local route, it renames the file properly.
Another example:
Download Stackoverflow Logo
The example above works properly.
Why download html attribute only works using local routes?
Thanks in advance!
The attribute download works only for same origin URLs.
By the way, you really should learn to use proper terminology, or else people won't understand you:
<a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/440u9.png" download="stackoverflow.png"> is a tag, specifically, an opening tag;
download is an attribute;
stackoverflow.png is the value of the attribute;
https://i.stack.imgur.com/440u9.png is a URL, sometimes called an URI or an address.
The entire construction Download Stackoverflow Logo is an element.
A "route" is something else entirely, and has no relationship with HTML.
I couldn't find any info of it, but seems like external resources aren't allowed renaming.
Have a look here, there's an example linking to google image and that doesn't work either - seems like the specs have changed along the way.
This is a security measure applied to cross-origin download requests where the server hosting the download does not use HTTP headers to explicitly mark the file as being for download.
From the HTML specification:
If the algorithm reaches this step, then a download was begun from a
different origin than the resource being downloaded, and the origin
did not mark the file as suitable for downloading, and the download
was not initiated by the user. This could be because a download
attribute was used to trigger the download, or because the resource in
question is not of a type that the user agent supports.
This could be dangerous, because, for instance, a hostile server could
be trying to get a user to unknowingly download private information
and then re-upload it to the hostile server, by tricking the user into
thinking the data is from the hostile server.
Thus, it is in the user's interests that the user be somehow notified
that the resource in question comes from quite a different source, and
to prevent confusion, any suggested file name from the potentially
hostile interface origin should be ignored.
I'd like to have an html file that organizes certain files scattered throughout my hard drive. For example, I have two files that I would link to:
C:\Programs\sort.mw
C:\Videos\lecture.mp4
The problem is that I'd like the links to function as a shortcut to the file. I've tried the following:
Link 1
Link 2
... but the first link does nothing and the second link opens the file in Chrome, not VLC.
My questions are:
Is there a way to adjust my HTML to treat the links as shortcuts to the files?
If there isn't a way to adjust the HTML, are there any other ways to neatly link to files scattered throughout the hard drive?
My computer runs Windows 7 and my web browser is Chrome.
You need to use the file:/// protocol (yes, that's three slashes) if you want to link to local files.
Link 1
Link 2
These will never open the file in your local applications automatically. That's for security reasons which I'll cover in the last section. If it opens, it will only ever open in the browser. If your browser can display the file, it will, otherwise it will probably ask you if you want to download the file.
You cannot cross from http(s) to the file protocol
Modern versions of many browsers (e.g. Firefox and Chrome) will refuse to cross from the http(s) protocol to the file protocol to prevent malicious behaviour.
This means a webpage hosted on a website somewhere will never be able to link to files on your hard drive. You'll need to open your webpage locally using the file protocol if you want to do this stuff at all.
Why does it get stuck without file:///?
The first part of a URL is the protocol. A protocol is a few letters, then a colon and two slashes. HTTP:// and FTP:// are valid protocols; C:/ isn't and I'm pretty sure it doesn't even properly resemble one.
C:/ also isn't a valid web address. The browser could assume it's meant to be http://c/ with a blank port specified, but that's going to fail.
Your browser may not assume it's referring to a local file. It has little reason to make that assumption because webpages generally don't try to link to peoples' local files.
So if you want to access local files: tell it to use the file protocol.
Why three slashes?
Because it's part of the File URI scheme. You have the option of specifying a host after the first two slashes. If you skip specifying a host it will just assume you're referring to a file on your own PC. This means file:///C:/etc is a shortcut for file://localhost/C:/etc.
These files will still open in your browser and that is good
Your browser will respond to these files the same way they'd respond to the same file anywhere on the internet. These files will not open in your default file handler (e.g. MS Word or VLC Media Player), and you will not be able to do anything like ask File Explorer to open the file's location.
This is an extremely good thing for your security.
Sites in your browser cannot interact with your operating system very well. If a good site could tell your machine to open lecture.mp4 in VLC.exe, a malicious site could tell it to open virus.bat in CMD.exe. Or it could just tell your machine to run a few Uninstall.exe files or open File Explorer a million times.
This may not be convenient for you, but HTML and browser security weren't really designed for what you're doing. If you want to be able to open lecture.mp4 in VLC.exe consider writing a desktop application instead.
If you are running IIS on your PC you can add the directory that you are trying to reach as a Virtual Directory.
To do this you right-click on your Site in ISS and press "Add Virtual Directory".
Name the virtual folder. Point the virtual folder to your folder location on your local PC.
You also have to supply credentials that has privileges to access the specific folder eg. HOSTNAME\username and password.
After that you can access the file in the virtual folder as any other file on your site.
http://sitename.com/virtual_folder_name/filename.fileextension
By the way, this also works with Chrome that otherwise does not accept the file-protocol file://
Hope this helps someone :)
Janky at best
right click </td>
and then right click, select "copy location" option, and then paste into url.
back to 2017:
use URL.createObjectURL( file ) to create local link to file system that user select;
don't forgot to free memory by using URL.revokeObjectURL()
I've a way and work like this:
<'a href="FOLDER_PATH" target="_explorer.exe">Link Text<'/a>
Is there a way to provide a hyperlink to a file on a file server but rather than downloading it, have it open in an application? For example a .doc file on the server, but rather than downloading the file it would then open in word so the user could edit the file directly instead of downloading a copy?
I have tried using file:///// but that seems to just download the file.
There are a number of misconceptions in your question:
It is up to the browser how a particular type of file is handled
The user does not get to do anything directly on the server; if anything, the server would provide a copy of the file, and would accept a modified version for replacement. This would require co-ordination between the two.
file:// is used to identify a file on the local computer
You can force a response to download with the Content-Disposition header, but that requires serverside doings, and you still can't force an open - that is up to the end-user and their browser, and you can't change that.
If you're developing both sides of the application (the webserver side and a client-side application), you can use application specific URIs, and register those with the operating system on the client side. This is what applications like Spotify do - they link to a URI like spotify://song.info.here, and if Spotify is installed, the browser hands off to the application.
No. You can`t do that. The user always will be prompted to either save or open the file
Well, using HTML5 file handlining api we can read files with the collaboration of inpty type file. What about ready files with pat like
/images/myimage.png
etc??
Any kind of help is appreciated
Yes, if it is chrome! Play with the filesytem you will be able to do that.
The simple answer is; no. When your HTML/CSS/images/JavaScript is downloaded to the client's end you are breaking loose of the server.
Simplistic Flowchart
User requests URL in Browser (for example; www.mydomain.com/index.html)
Server reads and fetches the required file (www.mydomain.com/index.html)
index.html and it's linked resources will be downloaded to the user's browser
The user's Browser will render the HTML page
The user's Browser will only fetch the files that came with the request (images/someimages.png and stuff like scripts/jquery.js)
Explanation
The problem you are facing here is that when HTML is being rendered locally it has no link with the server anymore, thus requesting what /images/ contains file-wise is not logically comparable as it resides on the server.
Work-around
What you can do, but this will neglect the reason of the question, is to make a server-side script in JSP/PHP/ASP/etc. This script will then traverse through the directory you want. In PHP you can do this by using opendir() (http://php.net/opendir).
With a XHR/AJAX call you could request the PHP page to return the directory listing. Easiest way to do this is by using jQuery's $.post() function in combination with JSON.
Caution!
You need to keep in mind that if you use the work-around you will store a link to be visible for everyone to see what's in your online directory you request (for example http://www.mydomain.com/my_image_dirlist.php would then return a stringified list of everything (or less based on certain rules in the server-side script) inside http://www.mydomain.com/images/.
Notes
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/file/filesystem/ (seems to work only in Chrome, but would still not be exactly what you want)
If you don't need all files from a folder, but only those files that have been downloaded to your browser's cache in the URL request; you could try to search online for accessing browser cache (downloaded files) of the currently loaded page. Or make something like a DOM-walker and CSS reader (regex?) to see where all file-relations are.
I have several buttons on a Download page that I want to link to different movies stored on the server so that once the user clicks the download button the movie will download to their computer. How do I do this? I thought it was simply a case of putting the directory path to the relevant file into the link for the button?
Here's the page: http://www.infomaticfilms.com/jack/infomatics/download.htm
Any help would be appreciated.
Jack
I assume that you want the user to be presented with a Save As dialog instead of just opening the file in the browser?
There are really two components that make this happen:
The user's browser is configured to download that type instead of open it directly. You have no control over this, it's up to the user's own configuration.
Your server suggests to the browser that it should download that type instead of open it directly. This is done via a header value in your server's response.
The header you're looking for is called Content Disposition. How you use it is up to your server-side capabilities. But basically you want to set it to something like:
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="filename.mpg"
This response header tells the browser that what you're sending it is a file and should be locally saved as one. (Remember that HTTP by itself has no notion of "files", only requests and responses with headers and data.)