I’ve been tweaking JSTorrent to add support for writing directly to user selected directories.
In the manifest file, you need to add the “write”, “directory”, and “retainEntries” permissions. The documentation is here
The tricky part is handling external media. There’s a way to get events when external media is attached and detached. You need to request “system.storage” permission. Docs here
Unfortunately the directory “Entry” given by chrome.fileSystem.chooseEntry with the {type:”directory”} option does not give any information as to whether the directory selected by the user resides on an external storage or the internal storage of the device.
This could be a very poor user experience. A torrent job would simply show some kind of “storage error” and not be able to tell the user that they need to re-attach a specific external storage device.
The documentation for chrome.* APIs is spartan as usual, so it leaves developers to explore all the edge cases and make guesses as to whether these are accidental or intended and with unit tests backing these behaviors.
When the storage is detached, a call to chrome.fileSystem.restoreEntry will NOT fail! However, when trying to do some kind of access on the machine that would require actually accessing the device, such as trying to read the entry’s metadata, you will get the error callback.
So it’s at least possible to infer that a given retained Entry may be from a detachable storage, if doing a getMetadata call returns a NotFoundError. However this error also occurs when the selected directory is renamed or removed (incidentally, if a new directory is created and has the same absolute path on the same disk, it can be accessed and written to via retainEntry, even though the actual inode is different)
So the moral of the story is – to the retainEntry mechanism, there is really no difference between external storage not being available, and a directory simply being removed from the SSD/internal disk. I guess that’s pretty elegant, after all. So simply messaging “directory or external disk missing” is the simplest solution. Maybe only displaying “or external disk” if chrome.system.storage.getInfo shows there was in fact an external disk present when the user called chooseEntry.
