Accessing Data Files

[psychemedia]

This extension works well for opening notebook files from the filesystem :-)

It might be useful to try to catalogue how things are handled differently compared to accessing files from local storage because different workarounds may be required to handle different situations depending on where files are located:

• when opening notebook files from the JupyterLite file system, a copy of the files appears in local browser storage; when opening from the desktop filesystem, no copy appears in local browser storage;
• if you open a data file from the JupyterLite file system and then save it, it appears in local browser storage; it can then be opened programmatically from local browser storage;
• you can't seem to open a data file from the local filesystem and save it into browser storage (I guess if you could do that it could start to provide a way to exfiltrate files?)?
• Irrespective of whether the jupyterlab-filesystem-access extension is installed, you can manually upload a data file from the desktop file system into the JupyterLite file system (this seems to have a side effect of also placing the file immediately into browser storage). I note that the directory path the upload file file picker opens at may be different to the directory path used in selecting the directory on the desktop filesystem. It might be useful if these could be synched?