I heard about the Native File System today and thought it would be so useful for database storage.
So I had a play with it and got stuck.
The windows.chooseFileSystemEntries() keeps yelling at me,
SecurityError: Failed to execute ‘chooseFileSystemEntries’ on ‘Window’: Cross origin sub frames aren’t allowed to show a file picker.
But I have no problem running it from the console.
Could it be a CORS issue of something else?
Unfortunately this looks like it won’t be possible based on the security design of this feature:
- The API will deny requests for user decisions coming from 3rd-party frames.
You could petition the browser vendors to add support for this. Alternatively, it might be possible for Observable to pass-through access to native files in the future, like we’ve done for FileAttachment.
In the meantime here’s another way to read local files:
The local files works a little but the advantage of the new native file system is, once given permission a file can be updated without further user input. This would be really useful for doing database storage.
So I hope that there will be Observable to proxy support for it (similar to how you can download JSON or CSV from cells) can be implemented.
Agreed, this would be useful.
For example, it would be possible to allow a user to choose a local file, open the file for editing in a notebook (perhaps running a script to fetch some data), and save changes back to the local file.
Are we in the future yet? 
