Read local JSON file (no web-server) with JavaScript

Question

It seems that this has been asked a number of times, but I would like to make sure there are still no other alternatives.

So what I need to do is:

1. Generate a .JSON file from .net (easy)
2. Read the local JSON file with JavaScript and produce an html page with useful graphs etc (using Raphaeljs).
3. Deliver the outcome (HTML + associated JavaScript) to the client.

I wouldn't mind installing a local Apache to read the JSON file easily but since I cannot ask the client to do this, I am looking for a way to read a local JSON file (on the filesystem, no web server) with JavaScript, so that I eventually provide the client with the HTML, .js and .json and he can see the associated graphs.

I 've been reading that FileReader class is an option but I want to have the flexibility to support these on a number of IE browsers (let say IE7 to IE10).

Any help on how to work round this would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Web browsers are not able to read files from the file system due to security reasons. If I've understood correctly, you have a .NET application running on the local machine?

If this is the case, you can host a WCF service to serve the JSON from your application. WCF self-hosting is described on this MSDN page. You should be able to make AJAX requests from the browser to a server hosted within you application on localhost.