Is there a way to know if geolocation is enabled for the current domain?

Question

The website I'm working on uses HTML5 geolocation api. It works fine, but I need to know if the feature has been authorized.
navigator.geolocation only tells if the feature is available. What I want to know is whether the user has enabled it already. Basically, I need to know if the browser will request permission to use the feature. Is it possible?

Answer 1

If the user does not allow your app to use the Geolocation API the methods getCurrentPosition and watchPosition will return an PositionError object via the error callback:

void getCurrentPosition(successCallback,
                        errorCallback,
                        options);

long watchPosition(successCallback,
                   errorCallback,
                   options);

The PositionError looks like:

PositionError {
    code;
    message;
};

where the possibles values of code are:

PositionError.PERMISSION_DENIED = 1;
PositionError.POSITION_UNAVAILABLE = 2;
PositionError.TIMEOUT = 3;

And more specific:

• PERMISSION_DENIED (numeric value 1) The location acquisition process failed because the document does not have permission to use the Geolocation API.

The documentation here.

Answer 2

There is no check for permanent authorization.
The only thing you can do imho is try to "guess" if the user has authorized by estimate time.
For example:

• more than 1,5 seconds to retrieve geolocation -> probably user got to click interface and give auth

• less than 500ms -> pretty sure user already give auth