Using HTML5/JavaScript to generate and save a file

Question

I\'ve been fiddling with WebGL lately, and have gotten a Collada reader working. Problem is it\'s pretty slow (Collada is a very verbose format), so I\'m going to start conv

Answer 1

This thread was invaluable to figure out how to generate a binary file and prompt to download the named file, all in client code without a server.

First step for me was generating the binary blob from data that I was saving. There's plenty of samples for doing this for a single binary type, in my case I have a binary format with multiple types which you can pass as an array to create the blob.

saveAnimation: function() {

    var device = this.Device;
    var maxRow = ChromaAnimation.getMaxRow(device);
    var maxColumn = ChromaAnimation.getMaxColumn(device);
    var frames = this.Frames;
    var frameCount = frames.length;

    var writeArrays = [];


    var writeArray = new Uint32Array(1);
    var version = 1;
    writeArray[0] = version;
    writeArrays.push(writeArray.buffer);
    //console.log('version:', version);


    var writeArray = new Uint8Array(1);
    var deviceType = this.DeviceType;
    writeArray[0] = deviceType;
    writeArrays.push(writeArray.buffer);
    //console.log('deviceType:', deviceType);


    var writeArray = new Uint8Array(1);
    writeArray[0] = device;
    writeArrays.push(writeArray.buffer);
    //console.log('device:', device);


    var writeArray = new Uint32Array(1);
    writeArray[0] = frameCount;
    writeArrays.push(writeArray.buffer);
    //console.log('frameCount:', frameCount);

    for (var index = 0; index < frameCount; ++index) {

      var frame = frames[index];

      var writeArray = new Float32Array(1);
      var duration = frame.Duration;
      if (duration < 0.033) {
        duration = 0.033;
      }
      writeArray[0] = duration;
      writeArrays.push(writeArray.buffer);

      //console.log('Frame', index, 'duration', duration);

      var writeArray = new Uint32Array(maxRow * maxColumn);
      for (var i = 0; i < maxRow; ++i) {
        for (var j = 0; j < maxColumn; ++j) {
          var color = frame.Colors[i][j];
          writeArray[i * maxColumn + j] = color;
        }
      }
      writeArrays.push(writeArray.buffer);
    }

    var blob = new Blob(writeArrays, {type: 'application/octet-stream'});

    return blob;
}

The next step is to get the browser to prompt the user to download this blob with a predefined name.

All I needed was a named link I added in the HTML5 that I could reuse to rename the initial filename. I kept it hidden since the link doesn't need display.

The last step is to prompt the user to download the file.

var data = animation.saveAnimation();
var uriContent = URL.createObjectURL(data);
var lnkDownload = document.getElementById('lnkDownload');
lnkDownload.download = 'theDefaultFileName.extension';
lnkDownload.href = uriContent;
lnkDownload.click();