Question

I’ve built an app for Windows Store that writes to local files using Windows.Storage.FileIO (createFileAsync, readTextAsync and writeTextAsync).

My plan is to use the file as a simple database (the data is simply JSON formatted user information). Is this a bad idea?

Are the files written this way really persistent (or are they deleted when the app is updated)? Can the user themselves delete them (for example through deleting cookies/temp internet files or the likes)?

I’m just wondering how files written to the disk locally by apps are treated by the “Metro” environment…

Answer 1

The question of whether it’s a “bad idea” is quite subjective, so probably not the right venue for that.

However, in terms of how Windows Store apps treat files you store, if you create and/or edit files using Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.current.localFolder, these files will be available until the user uninstalls the app. If you push an update of your app to the store, and the user downloads and installs the update, the files will remain on the user’s machine, unless you explicitly modify them programmatically.

In two apps that I’ve built, I leverage the localFolder to store JSON representations of the app’s data so that I can minimize startup time, and refresh the data in the background once the app has started up and rendered its initial UI to the user.

Here’s what my code (which could probably be optimized a bit) looks like:

appData.current.localFolder.createFileAsync("leaderboard.txt", 
    Windows.Storage.CreationCollisionOption.openIfExists)
.then(function (file) {
    leaderboardFile = file;
    return Windows.Storage.FileIO.readTextAsync(file)
})
.then(function (fileContents) {
    cachedLeaderboard = fileContents;
    if (!cachedLeaderboard || isRefresh) {
        return WinJS.xhr(xhrOptions)
    }
    else {
        cachedLeaderboard = JSON.parse(cachedLeaderboard);
        List = new WinJS.Binding.List(cachedLeaderboard);
        completed(List);
    }
})
.then(function (result) {
    if (result) {
       var items = JSON.parse(result.responseText).d;
       localLeaderboard = items;
       return Windows.Storage.FileIO.writeTextAsync(leaderboardFile, 
           JSON.stringify(localLeaderboard))
    }
})
.then(function () {
    if (!localLeaderboard)
    localLeaderboard = cachedLeaderboard;
    List = new WinJS.Binding.List(localLeaderboard);
    completed(List);
})

Basically, the code will check whether the leaderboard.txt file exists (or if the call is a refresh of the data), and if not, make an XHR call to get the data, then create a binding list and pass it back to the caller wrapped in a promise (the promise code isn’t shown). If the file exists, and the request isn’t a refresh, I just parse the text file and create the binding list from that.

Hope that helps!