File browser control to replace <input type="file">

Question

I'm working on an ASP.NET web application for our corporate intranet users. I have a form where a user should provide a path to the file on the local network (something like "\localServer\someFolder\someFile.ext") without uploading the actual file. The issue is that users don't want to type the whole file path and want to use some kind of visual browse dialog.

The standard HTML <input type=file> element allows to browse for a file, but most of the browsers (except for IE) don't allow to access file's full path, so I think it should be done by some external component like Silverlight, Flash, Java applet etc.

I tried to do it with Silverlight, but I'm getting a SecurityException when trying to access file's full path using Silverlight's OpenFileDialog class.

This java applet http://jumploader.com/demo_images.html seems to do something similar to what I'm looking for, but it's focused on uploading files - I only need to be able to get file's full path and pass it to the server as a string.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

This should be possible with Flash's uploading capabilities. SWFUpload has an API that you may be able to access from JavaScript to extract the selected file name without actually uploading anything. See docs here, for example getFile():

getFile is used to retrieve a File Object from the queue. The file retrieved by passing in a file id (the id property from a file object) or a file index (the index property from a file object).