File.dataDirectory static in ionic-native can not be found by typescript

Ionic Framework ionic-v3
1

I’ve got this exact problem, as experienced by the OP very recently:

one suggestion on that SO posts suggests doing a npm@latest install, but that doesn’t work, what does “fix” it is using the cordova.file.XXXX underlying plugin code, but you have to declare cordova as a global var after your imports to satisfy typescript…

this is hugely hacky and the File class “does” specify a static correctly as can be seen here:

https://github.com/driftyco/ionic-native/blob/master/src/plugins/file.ts#L386

so why would using the code as per the example(!) not work???

import { File } from 'ionic-native';
const dataDirectory: string = File.dataDirectory;
File.checkDir(dataDirectory, 'mydir').then(_ => console.log('yay')).catch(err => console.log('boooh'));

the error you receive is:

Property 'dataDirectory' does not exist on type 'typeof File'.
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2

OK, it looks like the REAL answer is the version of file.js you get in the transpiled ionic-native bundled with ionic 2.2.1 does not “have” the static definitions

If you download the latest ionic-native code base from here: https://github.com/driftyco/ionic-native then run (in the project directory) a:

npm install

then:

npm run build

then as per the documentation: https://github.com/driftyco/ionic-native/blob/master/DEVELOPER.md

You need to run npm run build in the ionic-native project, this will create a dist directory. Then, you must go to your ionic application folder and replace your current node_modules/ionic-native/dist/ with the newly generated one

“THAT” truly works how it should (none of this nonsense with declaring a cordova var).

EDIT: yup, ionic 2.2.1 uses ionic-native 2.4.1 which doesn’t work, however, ionic-native 2.8.1 (latest) “does” work

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3

thanks, this works fine for me, cheers!

4

ionic-native 2.8.1 (latest) “does” work THANKS

5

I have since discovered the even more “correct” way of doing this is to change your project’s package.json to update the entry

    "ionic-native": "2.4.1"

to

    "ionic-native": "2.8.1"

or

    "ionic-native": "2.9.0"

and run

npm install

or

npm update

which “should” then update the ionic native package in the build.

Since then, ionic 3 has also come about using the even newer ionic-native 3 stuff (http://blog.ionic.io/ionic-native-3-x/), this would need you to entriely remove the old ionic-native package reference and replace it with

"@ionic-native/file": "3.12.1"

Basically, I’ve since discovered, the better way of solving this problem is to use npm to update your project… which is FANTASTICALLY poorly documented :rage:

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