drag n drop attachments is broken

I can confirm this behavior on my machine on Fedora with KDE.
it ask to create file, but actually has no content from attachment

confirmed on fedora fc 6 with thunderbird 2 release build.

with trunk build thunderbird-3.0a1.en-US.linux-i686, bug can also be reproduced

Similar problem with OS WinXP as well. If you drag the attachment to the desktop you have to keep the left mouse button pressed for some seconds so the attachment is "loaded" (you see a progress bar). Then you can release the button and the attachment is successfull copied. Otherwise (without waiting) an errormessage shows up ("file in use"). You can work with this unconvenience but it is unexpected, not state of the art and contradicts usability a lot (because it took me quite a while to find out).
If you can confirm this behaviour please extend this bug to OS WinXP as well.

bug still exists in new TB 2.0.0.4

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Build Identifier: Version 1.5.0.12 (20070509)

If you drag the attachment to the
desktop you have to keep the left mouse button pressed for some seconds so the
attachment is "loaded" (you see a progress bar). Then you can release the
button and the attachment is successfull copied. Otherwise (without waiting) an
error message shows up ("file in use"). You can work with this inconvenience but
it is unexpected, not state of the art and contradicts usability a lot (because
most people won't discover the workaround).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Quickly drag and drop big attachment (>3 MB) to desktop

Actual Results:
1. Error-Message "File in use", click on "OK" then
2. Download dialog with progress bar appears like the attachment is actually downloaded
3. No attachment is copied

Expected Results:
Copying attachment to desktop without any delay

bug still exists in TB 2.0.0.6

Confirm with 2.0.0.12 but NOT with trunk version 3.0a1pre (2008040204) - its ok no problem at all.

Please mark branch only bugs, subject or whiteboard.

You mean if its reproducible only with trunk but not current?

Yes, if you mean current=current stable version. Unfortunately bugzilla's version field is not multi select...

o-right then, I will not touch bugs if they only appears in current stable. Will just comment

Hej,

the problem is that thunderbird doesn't provide a text/uri-list flavour that
could be evaluated by the desktop environment to copy the attachment somewhere
else.

One idea would be to save the attachment to a temporary file and pass the url
of that file as a test/uri-list flavour in the drag operation.
To make that feature work for all platforms, a java script based implementation
would be preferred. So can somebody point me to the place in the mozilla sources
where the drag for attachments is started?
 mailnews/base/resources/content/msgHdrOverlay.js:attachmentAreaDNDObserver
sounds promising, however that method seems not to be called when I try to
drag an attachment from the message view.

BTW, when I drag the attachment to the desktop, the JS error console shows the following message:

Error: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsITransferable.getTransferData]" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://messenger/content/msgHdrViewOverlay.js :: anonymous :: line 1627" data: no]
Source File: chrome://messenger/content/msgHdrViewOverlay.js
Line: 1627

It seems like the 'application/moz-file-promise-url' flavour is missing...
Can somebody enlighten me what that flavour is for and why it could be missing?

Ciao,
Tobias

Created an attachment (id=328330)
Allows drag&drop of attachments from message view to desktop

Hej,

this patch allows drag&drop of attachments to the desktop by saving the requested attachment to a temporary file and passing the URL of that file in the drag object. The patch has still two issues: 1) '/tmp' is hard coded... It seems nsIFileUtilities::getTempDirPath() could help here, but how do I instantiate such a component?
2) The name of the temporary file is the same as stored in the attachment, however as it's a temporary file, it should have a unique name (like returned by mktemp(3) under Unix). nsIFileUtilities::newTempFileName() looks promising, but could it be that there is no implementation for that method?

Problem still exists in 2.0.0.14 and MS XP SP3.
See similar problem on OS Linux: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377621

See similar Win XP bug here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=384590

Bug only occurs, when attachment is "large" (> 2MB).

Ubuntu has this bug in bug tracker the link for it is
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/151162

Hej,

any news on that issue? Is the patch ok for review/superreview?

Ciao,
Tobias

Created an attachment (id=340309)
Use the directory-service for temporary file now

Hej,

the new patch uses directory-service to retrieve the temporary directory instead of hardcoding "/tmp".

Ciao,
Tobias

Two comments:
1. The patch need to be updated to apply the trunk
2. I still can't DnD my attachment to my desktop

(From update of attachment 340309)
dmose isn't building on linux much these days, so switching review to magnus.

Created an attachment (id=365417)
adapt to HEAD

Adapted to HEAD. Could somebody do a review soon, please?
I really don't want to update the patch here forever :(

I hope to get to this later this week, sorry about the delay.

(From update of attachment 365417)
Mozilla is using hg now, so for future ref, please make patches against hg tip (cvs HEAD is getting old).

The patch doesn't apply cleanly to hg tip, but I've unbitrotted and played with it a bit. Will attach that in a moment.

(no sr needed for mail/ only changes, and I'm not a super-reviewer)

Created an attachment (id=365876)
proposed fix (unbitrotted)

Unbitrotted, and creating the file:// url in a safer way.

This patch works, but it's a bit ugly.

Windows doesn't need to do it this way, so I'm thinking the "proper" fix is probably somewhere in the gtk drag service

http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mozilla/widget/src/windows/nsDragService.cpp#559
http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mozilla/widget/src/gtk2/nsDragService.cpp

What do you think?

*** Bug 428472 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

(From update of attachment 411924)
(In reply to comment #68)
> This patch should fix all mentioned issues. Only the 'check that all data are
> flushed' confused me... doesn't Close() flush the stream automatically before
> it closes?

Yes, it tries to, but that may not succeed. Check the return value of
outputStream->Close() to see whether it succeeded.

>+ // (http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-5441)

Thanks for filing that. That looks like a sensible suggestion (from my
limited understanding of the Qt APIs).

>+ tmpDir->CreateUnique(nsIFile::DIRECTORY_TYPE, 0700);

I think there should be a check for success here before adding to
mTemporaryFiles to be deleted.

The directory is created here, but this function can still fail to set
mTempFileUri (after cancelling the timer) ...

>+ if (!mTempFileUrl.IsEmpty()) {
>+ // start time to remove temporary files
>+ mTempFileTimer->InitWithCallback(static_cast<nsITimerCallback*>(this),
>+ NS_DND_TIMEOUT,
>+ nsITimer::TYPE_ONE_SHOT);

so I think this should check mTemporaryFiles.Count() instead of mTempFileUrl.

>+ // check whether transferable contains FilePromiseUrl flavor...
>+ PRBool foundFilePromiseFlavor = PR_FALSE;
>+ PRUint32 i;
>+ for (i = 0; i < numDragItems; i++) {

No need for a loop here as numDragItems == 1.

*** Bug 544738 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

The bug is still there in Thunderbird 3.1.7 (Ubuntu 10.4)

I can also confirm this in Thunderbird 3.1.7 on Ubuntu 10.4 (Gnome
With a warning message:
Error while copying.
There was an error getting information about "[folder_name]>[number]".
An in the show more details:
The specified location is not supported

Lorenzo.

Bug still here, TB 3.1.7 + Ubuntu 10.10 + gnome 2.32.0 and almost 4 years since the creation of the bug (2007-04-16)

Just so no-one forgets about this bug, I'm happy to announce that Thunderbird 5.0 on Ubuntu 10.10 still has this bug.

;(

Yep, confirmed here too. Quite unnerving, if I may say. It's a 4 years old bug on something that users will notice in the first 5 minutes of usage.

Confirmed using TB 7.0a2 nightlies on OSX Lion, when I drag an attachment to desktop it creates an empty file named "undefined" instead of the expected attachment.

Bug confirmed, TB 3.1.11 + Ubuntu 10.04 + gnome 2.32.0

Still there in Ubuntu 11.04, TB 3.1.12
I'm sure there is some good reason for the fix is taking so long to deliver after that spur of activity back in 2009. It would be appreciated if the developers could explain what is it. Maybe we can think all together about how to remove any hurdle preventing the resolution of this issue.

Repeated comments are not going to help get the bug fixed any faster. Please stop commenting unless you're willing to take on the bug or have a patch.

Your comment reminds me of http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/c2b4l/open_source_openofficeorg_we_have_a_problem/c0pqvz6

*** Bug 605610 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

The behaviour changed. Now when I drag and drop, on Ubuntu 11.10, i have a ".desktop" file created with a "link" to the mail object. The problem is that

1) clicking on the icon give the error Could not display "imap://romano%2Egiannetti%40...1.2&filename=13008%202011.pdf".

2) ...and even if I manage to open it (I can, with some opening and cut and paste and based on the fact that the application understand the URI) what happens if I go offline?

So I think it's worst than ever --- before you had an error, now it could seem that the operation succeeded.

Not sure it's worse but it seems not what we are used to.
All mail clients I know (and also Thunderbird) create a new file with a full copy of the attachment. That seems to create a link to the attachment. If wonder what happens if one edits the saved attachment (let's say it's a .doc on .odt) but I bet that it's just a bug, not the intended behavior.

I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.10 and installed some alternative desktop environments.
The behavior with the Unity and the GNOME desktops is what Romano describes.
With MATE (the Linux Mint desktop) I get the old error "The specified location is not supported".
That could mean that the error is in how the desktop environment handles the information passed to it by TB,

I can confirm this with Thunderbird 14.0 on Ubuntu 12.04 and Unity with all updates applied.