Download files and store them locally with Phonegap/jQuery Mobile Android and iOS Apps

Ref: 

• stackoverflow
• MDN: Local File System
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12748920/simple-example-with-window-requestfilesystem-function
• HTML5 Rocks

If you're calling requestFileSystem() for the first time, new storage is created for your app. It's important to remember that this file system is sandboxed, meaning one web app cannot access another app's files. This also means you cannot read/write files to an arbitrary folder on the user's hard drive (for example My Pictures, My Documents, etc.).

 Example code:

Use FileTransfer.download, here is an example:

function downloadFile(){

window.requestFileSystem(LocalFileSystem.PERSISTENT, 0, 
    function onFileSystemSuccess(fileSystem) {
        fileSystem.root.getFile(
        "dummy.html", {create: true, exclusive: false}, 
        function gotFileEntry(fileEntry) {
            var sPath = fileEntry.fullPath.replace("dummy.html","");
            var fileTransfer = new FileTransfer();
            fileEntry.remove();

            fileTransfer.download(
                "http://www.w3.org/2011/web-apps-ws/papers/Nitobi.pdf",
                sPath + "theFile.pdf",
                function(theFile) {
                    console.log("download complete: " + theFile.toURI());
                    showLink(theFile.toURI());
                },
                function(error) {
                    console.log("download error source " + error.source);
                    console.log("download error target " + error.target);
                    console.log("upload error code: " + error.code);
                }
            );
        }, fail);
    }, fail);
};
}

 File system for Android / iOS:

var file_path;
function setFilePath() {
    if(detectAndroid()) {   
        file_path = "file:///android_asset/www/res/db/";
        //4 Android
    } else {
        file_path = "res//db//";
        //4 apache//iOS/desktop
    }
}

Then I load my JSON files, wich are prepackaged with the app, into the local browser storage. Like this:

localStorage["my_json_data"] = loadJSON(file_path + "my_json_data.json");

function loadJSON(url) {
    return jQuery.ajax({
        url : url,
        async : false,
        dataType : 'json'
    }).responseText;
}

If I wanna update my data. I get the new JSON Data from the server and push it into the local storage. If the server is on a different domain, which is the case most of the time, you have to make a JSONP call (check jQuery's docs on JSONP). I did it kinda like this:

$.getJSON(my_host + 'json.php?function=' + my_json_function + '&callback=?', function (json_data) {
    //write to local storage
    localStorage["my_json_data"] = JSON.stringify(json_data);

});