electron
Recent Documents
Overview
Windows and macOS provide access to a list of recent documents opened by the application via JumpList or dock menu, respectively.
JumpList:
Application dock menu:
Example
Managing recent documents
```javascript fiddle=’docs/fiddles/features/recent-documents’ const { app, BrowserWindow } = require(‘electron’) const fs = require(‘fs’) const path = require(‘path’)
const createWindow = () => { const win = new BrowserWindow({ width: 800, height: 600 })
win.loadFile(‘index.html’) }
const fileName = ‘recently-used.md’ fs.writeFile(fileName, ‘Lorem Ipsum’, () => { app.addRecentDocument(path.join(__dirname, fileName)) })
app.whenReady().then(createWindow)
app.on(‘window-all-closed’, () => { app.clearRecentDocuments() if (process.platform !== ‘darwin’) { app.quit() } })
app.on(‘activate’, () => { if (BrowserWindow.getAllWindows().length === 0) { createWindow() } })
#### Adding a recent document
To add a file to recent documents, use the
[app.addRecentDocument][addrecentdocument] API.
After launching the Electron application, right click the application icon.
In this guide, the item is a Markdown file located in the root of the project.
You should see `recently-used.md` added to the list of recent files:
#### Clearing the list of recent documents
To clear the list of recent documents, use the
[app.clearRecentDocuments][clearrecentdocuments] API.
In this guide, the list of documents is cleared once all windows have been
closed.
## Additional information
### Windows Notes
To use this feature on Windows, your application has to be registered as
a handler of the file type of the document, otherwise the file won't appear
in JumpList even after you have added it. You can find everything
on registering your application in [Application Registration][app-registration].
When a user clicks a file from the JumpList, a new instance of your application
will be started with the path of the file added as a command line argument.
### macOS Notes
#### Add the Recent Documents list to the application menu
You can add menu items to access and clear recent documents by adding the
following code snippet to your menu template:
```json
{
"submenu":[
{
"label":"Open Recent",
"role":"recentdocuments",
"submenu":[
{
"label":"Clear Recent",
"role":"clearrecentdocuments"
}
]
}
]
}
Make sure the application menu is added after the 'ready'
event and not before, or the menu item will be disabled:
const { app, Menu } = require('electron')
const template = [
// Menu template here
]
const menu = Menu.buildFromTemplate(template)
app.whenReady().then(() => {
Menu.setApplicationMenu(menu)
})
When a file is requested from the recent documents menu, the open-file event
of app module will be emitted for it.