Test if filetype has default application - actionscript-3

Background: I have a readme file which is a .html file.
I am using _file.openWithDefaultApplication() to open this up in the browser.
This works perfectly and I thought was foolproof. Problem I have is it seems I have a better fool for a co-worker who was testing my application.
His Windows PC had NO default application set for a .html file so when he selected a default application, he choosen "notepad".. as you might have guessed, reading a .html in notepad was useless but Windows 8 choosen this as the default from that point onwards.
Question 1 Can I test if the application has a default application, so I can warn someone to open a .html file in a browser.
Question 2 Can I choose to ignore the default application if it is not a browser or somehow remove the default?

I can't find anything that lets you get the path to the browser executable directly. But if you are down with writing a native extension, you can probe the Windows Registry to get the path. Compare it against a known whitelist of popular browsers.
The Registry keys to inspect for a documented at Windows RegKey - Default Browser Application Path and at How to determine the Windows default browser (at the top of the start menu)
Writing native extensions is a bit of a hassle, and I've never written one for Windows desktop. It might be more trouble than you've bargained for.
.p

Related

How to disable Google Chrome source compression "?body=1"?

I'm trying to debug some JavaScript for a Rails project and its incredibly frustrating to go line by line when the source code is compressed in the Sources developer tab.
I know this compression is done by Chrome through the body variable. What I want to know is if there is any way to stop Chrome from compressing files in source view, i.e:
\application.js?body=1 --> \application.js
Thank you for your time.
Compression is being done by Rails. Disable it in your configuration:
# config/production.rb (or whatever environment you're in)
config.assets.compress = false
You might want to investigate a new feature in Chrome called Source Maps.
Source Maps allows Chrome to map the compressed source code it receives to the uncompressed original, which in turn means that you can debug the code, even though it's been compressed.
This feature should help you get around this kind of problem without having to change the compression settings on your server.
You can read more about it here: http://blog.mascaraengine.com/news/2012/4/16/sourcemap-support-in-chrome-greatly-improves-debugging.html
I believe this feature is still in test and not yet in the final release version of Chrome. I'm sure it will arrive in due course, but for the time being you may need to install the "Canary" version of Chrome, ie the pre-release version that includes all the forthcoming features that they're still working on.

Where does PERSISTENT file system storage store with chrome?

When doing webkitRequestFileSystem in window.PERSISTENT option in Google Chrome, where on my filesystem do files get written? I'd like to drop files there and have Chrome interact with them while I'm building and debugging this app.
For me, at least on Mac OSX, they're stored under /Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/File System for me. If you're using profiles, there will be profile directories instead of Default. However, each origin's saved files/folders are obfuscated under directories that won't be easy for you to interact with.
For debugging the Filesystem API, you have a few options:
Use this extension to view/remove files.
See the tips here: http://updates.html5rocks.com/2011/08/Debugging-the-Filesystem-API
That includes viewing stored files very easily using the filesystem: URLs.
Drop the Filesystem Playground demo (http://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/filesystem/filer.js/demos/index.html) into your origin. You can use that to view/rename/delete files/folders easily.
Chrome DevTools now has support for the Filesystem API for viewing the files stored under an origin. To use that, you will need to enable the Developer Tools experiments in about:flags, restart, hit the gear in the devtools (lower right corner), and enable the 'FileSystem inspection' under the experimental tab.
Just for completeness: on linux it goes into ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/File\ System/
On Windows XP, it is here: c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\File System\.
On Windows 7, the location is C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\File System.
It's not very useful to browse it because file and dir names are obfuscated (but content in files is unchanged).
As ebidel wrote the best way is using browser of filesystem: urls that incorporated into Chrome. It's excellent! You can get the url using fs.root.toURL() where fs is a FileSystem object that you get, for example, from window.webkitRequestFileSystem().
Seems like the filesystem storage is encoded to prevent exactly what was trying to do. I ended up writing a very simple file manager available here. Start up any web server (I like mongoose for its 0 setup) and go to the /filemanager.html route
I saved a file called log.txt on MAC
It ended up at
~/Library/Application\Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Storage/ext/panbljeniblfmcakpphmjmmnpcaibipi/def/File\ System/iso/p/00/
with file name 00000 and no ext
If you are using MAC OX, and you have more than one profile on your chrome, or you cannot find default in the path, replace default with profile. But depending on number of profiles you have, it could be profile 1, profile 2, etc

Offline web app for distribution in pendrives (Windows only)?

We are trying to distribute a basic HTML file with some links to a PDF document in a USB drive for advertising purposes. The idea is that an autorun opens up this HTML in the default browser. However, this might not be a good idea since it would look very amateur-ish and we will have to rely on the default browser's technology (which unfortunately has a good chance on being IE6/7!)
We've explored a few alternatives, but we can't find one that really fits what we are trying to achieve:
Mozilla Prism
Altough it seems like it's designed with offline web apps in mind, the executable creates files in the user's AppData directory and it's hard to configure the default paths. Also, Firefox doesn't have a default PDF viewer, so we will have to depend on the user's default PDF viewer (which might be Adobe Reader)
Mozilla Chromeless
Since Prism is inactive, the idea is still developing with Chromeless, which allows the developer to create the browser interface with basic HTML/JS/CSS. The main issue here is that somehow the build isn't loading HTML, all that's showing is a gray iframe. I'm not sure if it's just me, because there's nothing on the issues page.
Portable App
We could throw in the portable version of Firefox or Chrome and customize the XUL for Firefox or open Chrome in app mode.
Firefox's advantage is that it kind of supports relative paths (resource://), but it doesn't have a built-in PDF viewer. Chrome has a very good and lightweight PDF viewer and the built-in app mode is a very useful feature for us, but I can't find how to open a local path without the usual absolute path (file:///C:/) since we don't know what's the drive's letter.
Has anyone figure out how to handle this kind of issues? Thanks.
This has been asked three years ago, but it's unanswered, listed high in Google, and I stumbled over the exact same problem and can imagine that many others that seek to ship portable web apps that can be run locally and with a minimum of dependencies will encounter this issue, too.
The solution I am now going with is the node-webkit.
You can treat it like a portable version of chrome, however it excepts a relative path to your app's entry point, is about 40 MB smaller, and much more customizable than the --app mode of chrome (which isn't customizable at all if I remember correctly).
Github & Download:
https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit#downloads
An extensive guide:
http://thejackalofjavascript.com/getting-started-with-node-webkit-apps/
My usage suggestion for Windows:
First create an app package as explained in the guide linked above
For the node-wekit to load with your app, you need to start it like this:
nw.exe app.package
Where nw.exe is in the root of the zipped folder you downloaded and app.package is a zip file (can have any name) that contains your app data and package.json.
To do this silently, you can use a BAT file containing the (amended) call above and a VBS file containing something like this:
CreateObject("Wscript.Shell").Run "cmd /c launchNW.bat", 0, true
launchNW.bat being the name of your BAT file. Now run the VBS file; a window containing your web app should pop up without the command window appearing with it.
Finish reading the linked guide to learn more about customization options to do things like hiding the browser UI etc.

How would I go about creating a custom protocol that would always open an address with a specific browser?

Okay, so I'm a student programmer in my college's IT department, and I'm doing browser compatibility for a web form my boss wrote. I need the user to be able to open a local file from a shared drive with a single click.
The problem is that Firefox and Chrome don't allow that for security reasons. Thus, I'm trying to write a custom protocol of my own to open an address in Internet Explorer regardless of the browser being used.
Can anyone help me with this? I'd also be willing to try an alternative solution to the problem.
The below worked for me, is this what you mean?
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\foo]
#="URL: foo Protocol"
"URL Protocol"=""
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\foo\DefaultIcon]
#="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\foo\shell]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\foo\shell\open]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\foo\shell\open\command]
#="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe \"%1\""
Just to note, I'm running Win7Pro, so you may have to move around file path(s) to conform to your environment.
And if that doesn't work, create a proxy between the protocol and the browser, pass the argument(s) from foo:// to that, parse what's necessary, then hand it off to IE using start iexplorer.exe "args".
I'm unsure whether I understand your question, if it is how do I open local files using chrome/firefox, this is your anwser:
First a disclaimer, I have never done this and cannot vouch for the accuracy of my response
IE
Microsoft's security model is pretty fail so you can go right ahead and open these files
FireFox
Some quick googling found that Firefox can do this after either editing prefs.js as outlined here or installing an addon called LocalLink
Chrome
Practically impossible due to its security, until now when locallink was ported to chrome.

default browser path in different OS

I need the browser path that depend on different OS .
For example ,
in Win7 , Firefox's path might be
C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
Chrome might be
%APPDATA%\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
I am developing a Eclipse plug-in ,which help user launch browser for specific url in a project, it's going to speed up the web developing .
Sometimes we need to use chrome/firefox/IE8/safari to test web page ,
so that's why I am developing such a plug-in.
My user could set up the browser path manually now ,
and I could let them use default browser as first one. (it's already done.)
If I could have the paths in different OS/path ,
I could check if there's existing those file and setup the path by default.
(Just like what selenium-rc does.)
If there's any one have the information for default browser path?
The difficult part is there's too many OS and too many browsers,
hope you could help me to get the information.
Any browser that running on PC is welcome ,
like opera,IE,chrome,firefox,safari...etc
Query the default application of the HTTP protocol. Use the COM interface if possible.