wxWebViewEdge - user data folder

[wxtrac]

Issue migrated from trac ticket # 19317

component: WebView | priority: normal | keywords: wxWebViewEdge

2021-11-11 12:03:38: rk (Ronny Krueger) created the issue

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WebView2 allows to specify a user data folder where the component will "store browser data, such as cookies, permissions, and cached resources" (see here for more details).

The folder that the backend currently uses is hard-coded to wxStandardPaths::Get().GetUserLocalDataDir(). I see a couple of problems with that:

• There is only one folder per application which means that all data is shared between application instances. This is a good default but might be a problem with advanced use cases.
• According to the documentation (see above link) the application is responsible for this folder. But right now it is not possible to get this path without looking into the source code. Also, the used path is the user's local data directory itself (not a sub directory inside of it). This makes it quite hard if you want to delete the WebView2 data without accidentally deleting any other data that could have been put there.

I think the easiest way to fix this would be extending wxWebViewEdge with MSWSetUserDataDir() and MSWGetUserDataDir() methods that allow to specify and query the user data path from the application code.

One problem I see is that technically WebView2 allows to specify a different user data path for each instance. If wx wants to support this it would mean that this path cannot simply be a static variable in the backend but must be passed to and saved inside the wxWebViewEdge instance.