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by Alex Avrutin and Juan López
Introducing AWS FilePicker
FilePicker News
May 8, 2004
AWS FilePicker 2.1 is finally available! The new version has got a number of cool features that many users of the control were anticipating: file download, bulk file download, a new UI language—Portuguese, etc. See the What's New section below for full list of new features.
04/12/04
The preview of the next version of FilePicker (2.1) is available on the Demo page. Check out new features of the popular file management and selection tool for ASP.NET!
Overview
In many ways, FilePicker emulates the "Open File" dialog in Windows applications. AWS FilePicker is a free ASP.Net web control that lets users navigate through a folder on the server to select a file. The user can also upload files on the server, create folders, and copy/move/delete files and folders. You can easily adjust permissions you grant each user. You can easily adjust the permissions you grant each person. You can prohibit uploading, renaming, deleting, and/or creating files and folders. You also can limit the size of files that can be uploaded and restrict the allowed file types by their extensions. See all of these features in action and download the component with full source code for free!
Features
- Copying, moving, renaming, deletion of files and folders;
- Ability to work (copy, move, rename, delete) with several files at once;
- File upload;
- Ability to upload unlimited number of files at once in a ZIP archive. You upload the archive and the files are extracted as soon as upload is completed;
- Bulk file download (in a ZIP archive);
- Easy duplication of files and folders;
- Permission control: you can forbid uploading, renaming or deletion of files and folders. You can limit size of files that can be uploaded and restrict types of files which could be uploaded by their extensions. For example, you can let users upload pictures (gifs and jpgs) only with the size not more than 50KB.
- Multilingual interface. English, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese are already supported. Other languages can be added without even recompilation of the component;
- Picture preview;
- All major browsers supported. The component has been tested and works fine in Netscape 7.0, Opera 7.01, IE 6.0 (SP1) and Mozilla 1.2;
- Optimized and compiled for .Net Framework 1.1.
What's new?
- Ability to download files and entire folders in a ZIP archive. (Finally!);
- A serious security hole patched that allowed the user to go beyond the Upload folder and manage files everywhere in the web application, not just within the Upload folder;
- 'Select/Unselect All' checkbox lets select/unselect all items in the file list;
- By default, the file manager selects the file and closes after the file is uploaded. This saves much time for an average user. You can always disable this by clearing the checkbox called 'Select the file upon upload' on the Upload panel;
- Now FilePicker does not overwrite existing files upon upload but displays an error instead. You can get the files overwritten by turning on the 'Overwrite the file if already exists' checkbox on the Upload panel;
- A new user interface language in Portuguese! [Many thanks to Steve Smith, Nataliya Popova and Antonio Geraldo Vidal who suggested the features for this version and personally to Antonio Geraldo who translated FilePicker user interface into Portuguese!];
- Completely revised documentation. A couple of errata corrected.
Requirements
In order to work properly, AWS File Picker requires no more resources than an average ASP.NET web control:
- Microsoft.Net Framework 1.1+;
- Microsoft Internet Information Services;
- Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2003 is recommended if you want to work with the source code.
Web browsers supported
AWS FilePicker supports all major web browsers. The component has been tested and worked fine in Netscape 7.0, Opera 7.01, IE 6.0 (SP1) and Mozilla 1.2;
How to migrate from FilePicker 1.x to FilePicker 2.x
If you have an application developed with a previous version of FilePicker and you want to migrate to FilePicker 2.x, read this guide (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).
Support policy
Despite on the fact that this is free software, we do support it. If you have any questions or just want to share your thoughts feel free to write the authors:
Or contact our support service.
Known issues
Problem
Renaming folders in FilePicker causes loss of session variables if session state mode is set to InProc.
Comments
When session state is set to InProc, (the default setting for session state), session variables are lost when a folder is renamed with the System.IO.Directory.Move(). We believe that this is due to a bug in ASP.NET. [Note: This error also appeared in previous versions of this component. AWS FilePicker 1.x was a completely different file manager and it yielded the same results.]. If one changes the session state mode to StateServer (that is, a separate state service is used), everything works fine.
Solution
In order to avoid losing user's session data while working with FilePicker, you can do one of the following:
- Use the StateServer or SQLServer session state mode instead of InProc. For details on how to do it, see the Session State page in the .Net Framework SDK documentation (full path to the page: .Net Framework SDK -> Building Application -> Creating ASP.NET Web Application -> ASP.NET State Management -> Session State).
- Disable renaming in FilePicker. Note, however, that disabling the renaming feature will make it impossible to rename both files and folders.
<AWS:FilePicker id="FilePicker1" runat="server" fpUploadDir="~/Upload/" fpAllowRename="false"></AWS:FilePicker>
File system access notes
If you do not use authentication in your ASP.Net apps, all the file operations performed with AWS FilePicker (browsing, uploading, creating directories, etc) are made on behalf of the ASPNET (if you use IIS 5) or NETWORK SERVICE (if you use IIS 6) user account. Generally, it is fine for browsing, but you are likely to get the "permission denied" error if you attempt to upload or delete a file or create a folder. This happens because these accounts have insufficient privileges for writing operations. To avoid this you should either:
- Grant the ASPNET (in the case of IIS 5) or NETWORK SERVICE (in the case of IIS 6) user account permission for writing to the folder you selected for uploaded files. This is the easiest and most secure method. We recommend this for a public web application or if your application resides in a shared web hosting environment. Or,
- Authenticate users and give the accounts and/or groups specific access permissions for the upload folder. We recommend this for corporate Intranet applications where it is easy to control each user account. In this case, you need to implement the Windows authentication for your web app and turn impersonation on in the web.config file: <identity impersonate="true">.
More Details?
Please see the AWS FilePicker 2.1 Documentation (900 Kb, requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)
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AWS FilePicker 2.1
