Saving a file to the local disk in Silverlight

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All user code in Silverlight runs in a sandbox. Hence, for security reasons, there are no APIs to directly open local files from disk. However, there is a OpenFileDialog class which allows a Silverlight app to open files on disk. Human intervention is required to interact with the dialog box. This ensures that the user trusts the app to open the files selected in the dialog box.

However, currently there is no equivalent to writing to a file to disk, even if the user wants to allow such an operation. This is unfortunate. If you implemented a text or image editor in Silverlight, the user would not be able to save the edited file to disk. However, there is a workaround - but at the cost of extra network traffic. The solution involves the following steps:

  • The Silverlight client app running in the browser sends the data that needs to be saved to disk to the web server using a POST operation using System.Windows.Browser.Net.BrowerHttpWebRequest::GetResponse
  • The web server saves the data to a temporary file and returns a URL for the temporary file in the response
  • The Silverlight client app reads the URL that is returned in the System.Net.HttpWebResponse object.
  • It navigates to the URL using System.Windows.Browser.HtmlPage::Navigate.
  • This will result in the browser invoking the default action for the given file type. This is often to prompt the user to save the file to disk. If the browser opens the file directly, the user could then have the browser save the file to disk. If multiple files need to be saved, the web server could save them all in a zip file using System.IO.Compression.GZipStream.

This solution is obviously not ideal as it result in unnecessarily sending the data back and forth over the network. For large files, this could be prohibitive. For small files, its a reasonable solution until there is a SaveFileDialog API in Silverlight.

I do not know if there will be a SaveFileDialog in Silverlight 1.1, but I hear that the Silverlight team is looking into it...

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 24, 2007
    PingBack from http://www.artofbam.com/wordpress/?p=2668

  • Anonymous
    September 25, 2007
    I've made a few posts on the silverlight.net forums regarding the lack of a FileSaveDialog that would allow the user to be prompted for a path outside of protected storage. Ideally, once the user provided the path, an output stream would be returned to the caller. There are tons of applications, in addition to the text or image editors that you mentioned, that could use this feature.

  • Anonymous
    September 25, 2007
    Yes, I agree that save functionality would be quite useful. Will pass along the comment to the Silverlight team

  • Anonymous
    October 08, 2007
    Related discussion on http://silverlight.net/forums/t/4236.aspx

  • Anonymous
    July 25, 2008
    SavingafiletothelocaldiskinSilverlight AllusercodeinSilverlightrunsinasandbox.H...

  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2008
    SavingafiletothelocaldiskinSilverlight AllusercodeinSilverlightrunsinasandbox.H...

  • Anonymous
    August 22, 2008
    The comment has been removed