Bulk Upload

KARL users have long wished for a faster way to get many files from their desktop into KARL. Loading them one-at-a-time is quite cumbersome. The traditional alternatives required Flash or Java.

We propose to give power users an optional mechanism of uploading files which, though impractical under IE, is still possible under other browsers. For some, the pain of uploading one-at-a-time is higher than the pain of using a non-traditional browser.

Proposal

• Only consider this an optional extension of how KARL works. Since it won’t work in IE, we can’t make this a front-and-center feature.
• Have an area in a folder view that implements the HTML5 drag-and-drop specification for local files.
• Hook the uploading process to Javascript so we can control features in the upload process

Specification

• Target Firefox 3.6 and possibly Safari and Chrome
• If you have the target browser, on View Folder you get a new menu action of “Upload”
• Clicking on this brings up an Upload Files form
• Allow tags and security settings to be applied to the group of files when uploaded
• Present some explanation and a big area that says “Drag and drop files into this box”
• When files are dropped, analyze them to see if any are too big for the policy
• If an upload fails, put a red message under the entry for that file
• If a new drag group comes in after all the files are uploaded, replace the drag box. Otherwise, do not allow dropping until all existing files are uploaded.
• If possible, show mini-icons for file types such as PDF
• Provide a way to cancel a pending or in progress upload, as well as all uploads

Out of Scope

• Under this initial work, only folders will have this drag-and-drop file upload ability.
• Later, once we get more interest, we consider the right way to weave it more fully into the UI, possibly for other uses (blog attachments, wikipage authoring with images)
• IE might be supported using Google Gears, but that is likely a worse alternative than using Firefox