How do I handle local file uploads in electron?

Question

I'm having a hard time figuring out how to approach file uploads in atom electron. I would post code but I don't even know where to begin with this one.

In a standard web app I would post from the client to the server, either via a standard postback or using an ajax request. I have some pretty cool solutions for that. But in the case of electron, I'm not sure where or how to "post" the file back. I guess I just want to access the contents of my <input type='file' /> from node.js. How do I do this?

I could post to the browser process, but I don't know what the "address" would be. Or do I need to create a separate "page" in my app just to accept form posts? My background in web-dev is probably blinding me to some obvious answer, can someone help?

EDIT

Just to add a little more context, I have a .csv file which I'd like to allow the user to upload. I will then process this using node-csv and insert each returned row into the app's nedb datastore.

Answer 1

If you're going to process the file on the user's machine then there is no need to upload the file anywhere, it's already exactly where you need it. All you need to do is popup a dialog to allow the user to browse their file system and select the file they want your app to process. You can create a button and call dialog.showOpenDialog when the user presses it, that will get you a filename and you can then use Node's fs.readFile to read it from disk, then you can go ahead and process the contents in whichever way you want.