dialog

The dialog module provides APIs to show native system dialogs, such as opening files or alerting, so web applications can deliver the same user experience as native applications.

An example of showing a dialog to select multiple files and directories:

var win = ...;  // BrowserWindow in which to show the dialog
const dialog = require('electron').dialog;
console.log(dialog.showOpenDialog({ properties: [ 'openFile', 'openDirectory', 'multiSelections' ]}));

Note for OS X: If you want to present dialogs as sheets, the only thing you have to do is provide a BrowserWindow reference in the browserWindow parameter.

Methods

The dialog module has the following methods:

dialog.showOpenDialog([browserWindow, ]options[, callback])

• browserWindow BrowserWindow (optional)
• options Object
  • title String
  • defaultPath String
  • filters Array
  • properties Array - Contains which features the dialog should use, can contain openFile, openDirectory, multiSelections and createDirectory
• callback Function (optional)

On success this method returns an array of file paths chosen by the user, otherwise it returns undefined.

The filters specifies an array of file types that can be displayed or selected when you want to limit the user to a specific type. For example:

{
  filters: [
    { name: 'Images', extensions: ['jpg', 'png', 'gif'] },
    { name: 'Movies', extensions: ['mkv', 'avi', 'mp4'] },
    { name: 'Custom File Type', extensions: ['as'] },
    { name: 'All Files', extensions: ['*'] }
  ]
}

The extensions array should contain extensions without wildcards or dots (e.g. 'png' is good but '.png' and '*.png' are bad). To show all files, use the '*' wildcard (no other wildcard is supported).

If a callback is passed, the API call will be asynchronous and the result will be passed via callback(filenames)

Note: On Windows and Linux an open dialog can not be both a file selector and a directory selector, so if you set properties to ['openFile', 'openDirectory'] on these platforms, a directory selector will be shown.

dialog.showSaveDialog([browserWindow, ]options[, callback])

• browserWindow BrowserWindow (optional)
• options Object
  • title String
  • defaultPath String
  • filters Array
• callback Function (optional)

On success this method returns the path of the file chosen by the user, otherwise it returns undefined.

The filters specifies an array of file types that can be displayed, see dialog.showOpenDialog for an example.

If a callback is passed, the API call will be asynchronous and the result will be passed via callback(filename)

dialog.showMessageBox([browserWindow, ]options[, callback])

• browserWindow BrowserWindow (optional)
• options Object
  • type String - Can be "none", "info", "error", "question" or "warning". On Windows, "question" displays the same icon as "info", unless you set an icon using the "icon" option.
  • buttons Array - Array of texts for buttons.
  • defaultId Integer - Index of the button in the buttons array which will be selected by default when the message box opens.
  • title String - Title of the message box, some platforms will not show it.
  • message String - Content of the message box.
  • detail String - Extra information of the message.
  • icon NativeImage
  • cancelId Integer - The value will be returned when user cancels the dialog instead of clicking the buttons of the dialog. By default it is the index of the buttons that have "cancel" or "no" as label, or 0 if there is no such buttons. On OS X and Windows the index of "Cancel" button will always be used as cancelId, not matter whether it is already specified.
  • noLink Boolean - On Windows Electron will try to figure out which one of the buttons are common buttons (like "Cancel" or "Yes"), and show the others as command links in the dialog. This can make the dialog appear in the style of modern Windows apps. If you don't like this behavior, you can set noLink to true.
• callback Function

Shows a message box, it will block the process until the message box is closed. It returns the index of the clicked button.

If a callback is passed, the API call will be asynchronous and the result will be passed via callback(response).

dialog.showErrorBox(title, content)

Displays a modal dialog that shows an error message.

This API can be called safely before the ready event the app module emits, it is usually used to report errors in early stage of startup. If called before the app readyevent on Linux, the message will be emitted to stderr, and no GUI dialog will appear.