Limit the size of a file upload (html input element)

Question

I would like to simply limit the size of a file that a user can upload.

I thought maxlength = 20000 = 20k but that doesn't seem to work at all.

I am running on Rails, not PHP, but was thinking it'd be much simpler to do it client side in the HTML/CSS, or as a last resort using jQuery. This is so basic though that there must be some HTML tag I am missing or not aware of.

Looking to support IE7+, Chrome, FF3.6+. I suppose I could get away with just supporting IE8+ if necessary.

Thanks.

Answer 1

This is completely possible. Use Javascript.

I use jQuery to select the input element. I have it set up with an on change event.

$("#aFile_upload").on("change", function (e) {

    var count=1;
    var files = e.currentTarget.files; // puts all files into an array

    // call them as such; files[0].size will get you the file size of the 0th file
    for (var x in files) {

        var filesize = ((files[x].size/1024)/1024).toFixed(4); // MB

        if (files[x].name != "item" && typeof files[x].name != "undefined" && filesize <= 10) { 

            if (count > 1) {

                approvedHTML += ", "+files[x].name;
            }
            else {

                approvedHTML += files[x].name;
            }

            count++;
        }
    }
    $("#approvedFiles").val(approvedHTML);

});

The code above saves all the file names that I deem worthy of persisting to the submission page, before the submit actually happens. I add the "approved" files to an input element's val using jQuery so a form submit will send the names of the files I want to save. All the files will be submitted, however, now on the server side we do have to filter these out. I haven't written any code for that yet, but use your imagination. I assume one can accomplish this by a for loop and matching the names sent over from the input field and match them to the $_FILES(PHP Superglobal, sorry I dont know ruby file variable) variable.

My point is you can do checks for files before submission. I do this and then output it to the user before he/she submits the form, to let them know what they are uploading to my site. Anything that doesn't meet the criteria does not get displayed back to the user and therefore they should know, that the files that are too large wont be saved. This should work on all browsers because I'm not using FormData object.