How to open an external file from HTML

Question

I want a list of hyperlinks on a basic html page  which point to files on our corporate intranet   When a user clicks the link  I want the file to open  They are excel spreadsheets  and this is an intranet environment  so I can count on everyone having Excel installed   I ve tried two things    The obvious and simple thing     lt a href  file   server directory file xlsx  gt Click me  lt  a gt     A vbscript option that I found in a Google search     lt HTML gt   lt HEAD gt       lt SCRIPT LANGUAGE VBScript gt      Dim objExcel      Sub Btn1 onclick       call OpenWorkbook    server directory file xlsx       End Sub      Sub OpenWorkbook strLocation       Set objExcel   CreateObject  Excel Application       objExcel Visible   true     objExcel Workbooks Open strLocation     objExcel UserControl   true     End Sub       lt  SCRIPT gt       lt TITLE gt Launch Excel lt  Title gt   lt  HEAD gt   lt BODY gt       lt INPUT TYPE BUTTON NAME Btn1 VALUE  Open Excel File  gt   lt  BODY gt   lt  HTML gt     I know this is a very basic question  but I would appreciate any help I can get   Edit  Any suggestions that work in both IE and Firefox

User · Accepted Answer

Try formatting the link like this  looks hellish  but it works in Firefox 3 under Vista for me      lt a href  file      SERVER directory file ext  gt file ext lt  a gt

User · Answer

You may need an extra       lt a href  file    server directory file xlsx  gt Click me  lt  a gt

User · Answer

You re going to have to rely on each individual s machine having the correct file associations  If you try and open the application from JavaScript VBScript in a web page  the spawned application is either going to itself be sandboxed  meaning decreased permissions  or there are going to be lots of security prompts   My suggestion is to look to SharePoint server for this one  This is something that we know they do and you can edit in place  but the question becomes how they manage to pull that off  My guess is direct integration with Office  Either way  this isn t something that the Internet is designed to do  because I m assuming you want them to edit the original document and not simply create their own copy  which is what the default behavior of file    would be   So depending on you options  it might be possible to create a client side application that gets installed on all your client machines and then responds to a particular file handler that says go open this application on the file server  Then it wouldn t really matter who was doing it since all browsers would simply hand off the request to you  You would have to create your own handler like fileserver

User · Answer

lt a href  file   server directory file xlsx  target   blank  gt  if I remember correctly

User · Answer

Your first idea used to be the way but I ve also noticed issues doing this using Firefox  try a straight http    to the file - href  http   server directory file xlsx

User · Answer

If your web server is IIS  you need to make sure that the new Office 2007  I see the xlsx suffix  mime types are added to the list of mime types in IIS  otherwise it will refuse to serve the unknown file type   Here s one link to tell you how   Configuring IIS 6 for Office 2007

User · Answer

A simple link to the file is the obvious solution here  You just have to make shure that the link is valid and that it really points to a file

User · Answer

If the file share is not open to everybody you will need to serve it up in the background from the file system via the web server   You can use something like this  ASP Net Serve File For Download  example  archived copy of 2

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