[to sort] Improve file system support

[ben-ryder]

Permisison Flows

Implement flow for checking and requesting global permissions

• For android this includes managing all files: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/manage-all-files
• For web, this would include requesting persistent storage: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/StorageManager/persist
• TBC on iOS

Android

Current solution requests to manage all files, but Android code is rough and may be better ways.

Custom Plugin APIs

Headbase works with the filesystem lots, and using Capacitors FileSystem API and capawesome FilePicker means adding additional application API level complexity. it may be preferable in the medium/long term to write a custom plugin which could provide:

• exact APIs returning consistent file references (paths) and other metadata as required
• features like loading a directory tree via one call which currently requires processing and recursive calls in the platform api layer
• file query features which will hit the filesystem lots and could be more performant

The CapacitorSQLite plugin works well, but docs and API is not the easiest to use. A custom plugin here could allow for a streamlined API experience and add confidence that there won't be future issues.

Storage Access Framework (SAF)

It may also be possible to integrate with storage access framework (https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/document-provider)? i don't know if this would be covered by managing all file permissions, or seperate. I also don't know if/how this integrates with Capacitor FileSystem.
The use case I think this would support is reading/writing files to cloud provider DocumentProviders such as Google Drive, Dropbox etc.

[ben-ryder]

Commit 2249ff9 removed @apawesome/capacitor-file-picker in favour of a custom plugin which returns regular paths compatible with @capacitor/filesystem (and potentially more custom plugin methods in future instead too).

This has been tested on a real device to work with both internal storage and SD cards, not tested with SAP yet.

[ben-ryder]

Continuing with implementation for now using @capacitor/filesystem as much as possible. My strengths are in JS/web not native dev.

Revisiting custom native code in future would be worth it though, for example a native tree method rather than relying on recursive readdir calls in the app layer would likely be better for performance. The layered architecture and API layer will hopefully make this easy to do.

After a few tests SAP support is not an immediate priority now either due to the extra native dev involved. I'll do work to reject these locations during vault creation for now.