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view/edit office documents inside FF

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  • Last reply by yoyoma

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I am using FF 9 (the problem is not because my FF is not the most recent one). I am trying to write a method that will open an office (2007) document from Sharepoint sever(word/excel/ppt/..) inside the browser automatically. now : when I do it manually - it works fine. when I run the method while using IE - it works fine. when I run the method while using FF - it tries to open in the client computer (using Office2007) and not on the server (using Office Web App).

I am using FF 9 (the problem is not because my FF is not the most recent one). I am trying to write a method that will open an office (2007) document from Sharepoint sever(word/excel/ppt/..) inside the browser automatically. now : when I do it manually - it works fine. when I run the method while using IE - it works fine. when I run the method while using FF - it tries to open in the client computer (using Office2007) and not on the server (using Office Web App).

Chosen solution

Thanks for your help. I manage to find a way to solve my problem...I extracted the right URL from the DOM attribute and navigate to that address.

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Thank you for the updated description; this is easier to understand than the earlier thread (how can i "force" firefox to open an office doc in the browser and not download it and than open).

Just to complete the picture.

  • The document is on your Sharepoint site.
  • The user is clicking a link on your Sharepoint site -- or is the link on another site?
  • Firefox requests the file, and the Sharepoint server pushes the file to Firefox, but you want to change the "handler" for the file from Word 2007 to Sharepoint.
  • You know that Firefox can open the file in the browser window on the Sharepoint server because you can do that manually.

On that fourth point, what are the steps to do it manually? You may need to translate that into a coded URL, similar to the URLs used to divert mailto links to webmail sites. I'm not 100% certain that will work, but it seems like the best bet.

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  • the documents are on a Sharepoint site.
  • the user is clicking on the link that is on the Sharepoint site.
  • yes
  • yes

the steps I am doing manually : 1. before i start - i deactivate the sharepoint site feature that open the doc on the client computer by default. 2. I log into the Sharepoint site. 3. I click on the doc I want to open. ->the document is open in FF.

one thing I have noticed is : when I click on the doc that I want to open it has different URL address. it has one URL for manually clicking and one URL for automatically clicking and I have no idea why. I tried to look on the DOM object attributes but could not find the attribute that stores the "right" URL (=the one that will open the doc in FF).

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It sounds as though this is all internal to Sharepoint: if you say you want the document to open externally, it sends the correct code to direct the browser to open it externally; if you say you want to open it on the server, then it complies with that. It sounds as though you are looking for a way to change the first kind of URL to the second kind of URL, either after you click it, or in the page before you click it.

I don't have an installation of Sharepoint to experiment with, but I imagine others have worked on this before, perhaps in order to go in the other direction because they found the browser controls too limiting. Can you find anything on Microsoft's forums or any other Sharepoint forums about how the URLs are constructed?

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Chosen Solution

Thanks for your help. I manage to find a way to solve my problem...I extracted the right URL from the DOM attribute and navigate to that address.