dialog

Display native system dialogs for opening and saving files, alerting, etc.

Process: Main

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

const {dialog} = require('electron')
console.log(dialog.showOpenDialog({properties: ['openFile', 'openDirectory', 'multiSelections']}))

The Dialog is opened from Electron's main thread. If you want to use the dialog object from a renderer process, remember to access it using the remote:

const {dialog} = require('electron').remote
console.log(dialog)

Methods

The dialog module has the following methods:

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

• browserWindow BrowserWindow (optional)
• options Object
  • title String
  • defaultPath String
  • buttonLabel String - Custom label for the confirmation button, when left empty the default label will be used.
  • filters String[]
  • properties String[] - Contains which features the dialog should use, can contain openFile, openDirectory, multiSelections, createDirectory and showHiddenFiles.
• callback Function (optional)
  • filePaths String[] - An array of file paths chosen by the user

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
  • buttonLabel String - Custom label for the confirmation button, when left empty the default label will be used.
  • filters String[]
• callback Function (optional)
  • filename String

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 String[] - Array of texts for buttons. On Windows, an empty array will result in one button labeled "OK".
  • 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 macOS 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
  • response Number - The index of the button that was clicked

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)

• title String - The title to display in the error box
• content String - The text content to display in the error box

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.

Sheets

On macOS, dialogs are presented as sheets attached to a window if you provide a BrowserWindow reference in the browserWindow parameter, or modals if no window is provided.

You can call BrowserWindow.getCurrentWindow().setSheetOffset(offset) to change the offset from the window frame where sheets are attached.