Question

I am developing an app for my work (social housing) and I want it to be able to allow the user to take a photo and attach it to an email so they can send it to us (pictures of repairs etc)

I’m using Phonegap and Eclipse as I want the app to be cross platform but am testing in Android primarily at the moment. Is there a way to do this? I am currently using the code below with no avail.

      <script typr="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">

    function camera()
    {
        navigator.camera.getPicture(onSuccess, onFail, { quality: 20,
            destinationType: Camera.DestinationType.DATA_URL
         }); 

        function onSuccess(imageData) {
            var image = document.getElementById('image');
            var data = "data:image/jpeg;base64," + imageData;

            var link = "mailto:[e-mail]?body="+data+"&subject=john smith";

            window.location.href = link;
        }

        function onFail(message) {
            alert('Failed because: ' + message);
        }

    }
    </script>

So far I’ve tried passing the data through to the mail app using the mailto: &attachment method but that never attaches an image (most mail apps treat this as a security hole). Then I tried to embed the base64 code of the image in the body of the email (as shown above). Unfortunately the base64 just displays as plain text and makes mail unresponsive. I’ve also tried using the image URI instead of the Base64 method in Phonegap but that throws an ‘image.URI is not defined’ error in my logcat.

Is this possible? I know I can use intents for just android as detailed in another question here but this won’t work on iOS etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT 02/12/2012

What I’m trying to achieve here is the same functionality you get in the native Android gallery/camera app. After you take a picture you have share options, one of which is mail. If you chose to share via mail the image is passed to the mail app as an attachment. Is there any way I can implement this same functionality in my app?

Answer 1

So it looks like there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution for this problem.

The mailto: method just doesn’t pass attachments in most modern mail apps as it’s seen as a security risk. So regardless of whether its an imageURI or a base64 encoded image, mailto: just won’t work. The passing of ‘subject’ and ‘body’ works well though for anyone that wants to use the above code for pre-filling in an email with no attachments.

After posing this question elsewhere it looks like I’ll need to use a phonegap plugin (emailComposer for iOS and WebIntent for Android) in order to pass an image sucessfully to a mail app from my phonegap app.

Thanks.