Show "Open File" Dialog From Rust?

[swissmanu]

I am diving into implementing my own menus as described here https://tauri.studio/docs/guides/menu

So far, I defined a CustomMenuItem labeled Open. My goal is to let the user select a file and then do some processing on that file. My first intuition was to emit a global "showFileDialog" event once the user clicked the CustomMenuItem. I'd then handle that event in the frontend and use the dialog API (https://tauri.studio/docs/api/js/modules/dialog) to show the file dialog.

Is this the way to go, or is there a more elegant way where I show the file dialog "directly" from within Rust-world, without a detour to JS-land first?

[xuchaoqian]

Use the Dialog APIs from rust: The Dialog API module allows you to show messages and prompt for file paths.

[swissmanu]

This looks kind of too obvious... 🙈 ... Thank you! Will give it a try.

[swissmanu]

After RTFM, this is what I ended up with:

use tauri::api::dialog;
use tauri::{CustomMenuItem, Menu, MenuItem, Submenu};

fn main() {
  let open = CustomMenuItem::new("open".to_string(), "Open");
  let fileMenu = Submenu::new("File", Menu::new().add_item(open));
  let menu = Menu::new()
    .add_submenu(fileMenu)
    .add_native_item(MenuItem::Separator)
    .add_native_item(MenuItem::Quit);

  tauri::Builder::default()
    .menu(menu)
    .on_menu_event(|event| match event.menu_item_id() {
      "open" => {
        dialog::FileDialogBuilder::default()
          .add_filter("Markdown", &["md"])
          .pick_file(|path_buf| match path_buf {
            Some(p) => {}
            _ => {}
          });
      }
      _ => {}
    })
    .run(tauri::generate_context!())
    .expect("error while running tauri application");
}

Please bear with me... Still new to Rust 🦀😇

[JonBackupRepos]

Hi Ivorface, very helpful answer. You wouldn't perhaps know how to receive that custom event in the frontend if it's using Yew? I can handle message passing front to back, but not back to front somehow with Yew-Tauri builds.

[Ivorforce]

@JonBackupRepos Sorry, I don't know anything about yew. I don't know why it would make a difference though; tauri is managing the passed messages and you have to listen to it yourself on the frontend. Here's how I do it for React.

[JonBackupRepos]

@Ivorforce, sadly, I have to use WASM for this application. Found a way to handle the listen, involves tauri_sys for API access and some futures work, but working now. Thanks anyway

[Nikitf777]

Why when I'm trying to use tauri::api::dialog, it says "could not find api in tauri"?

[FabianLars]

because tauri::api is a v1 thing. In v2 most of the api modules were moved to separate plugins, in this case https://v2.tauri.app/plugin/dialog/