RE: MS IE/Office/Web Folder Behaviors with WebDAV

Accidentally caught by the spam filter.

- Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Gary M Gershon [mailto:gershon@celsus.net]
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2000 6:02 PM
To: Tim Ellison/OTT/OTI; WebDAV WG
Cc: dav-dev@lyra.org
Subject: [Moderator Action] RE: MS IE/Office/Web Folder Behaviors with
WebDAV


 From Tim's response, I realized that LOCKING was likely the menu driver
and I spent more time studying the behavior of Microsoft Office.  In the
process, I think I've answered one of my questions.  To share some of my
observations:

1.  When using Word or Excel as separately launched applications (that is,
not in the IE browser window), they are properly locking the file and do
enable the File>Save menu choice.  I was able to observe locking by using
Sharemation's very spiffy 'details' web view of the document, and could see
that an exclusive lock was issued.

2.  Within IE, no lock was issued and the File>Save menu is disabled.  It
was not obvious why this behavior was different, so I went to the W98SE
Start>Settings>Folder Options>File Types>Edit menu to change  IE so that it
would launch Excel as a separate application, rather than showing it within
IE's window.  This was enlightening:  The check-box is labeled: 'Browse in
same window' which gives the clear impression that the intention is to
launch a (read-only) browser, and not launch the fully-enabled
application.  Thus the behaviors of not issuing a lock and not enabling the
File>Save menu are quite consistent for a browser.

My conclusion, at the moment, is that if the user desires to click on a MS
Office document URL to a WebDAV server and edit the document, then one
needs to have modified the File Type entry to un-check the 'Browse in same
window' option.

Does anyone know if there is a way to build the URL in the web page to
force the application to be launched separately, rather than within the IE
window, so that the workstation's File Type entry wouldn't need to be
changed?  Perhaps JavaScript, an Applet, or an ActiveX control could do
this?  What would be the best practice?

Gary

Snipped...
> >1.  Using IE, when launching an MS Office product
> >(Word/Excel) from a web page URL pointing to a WebDAV
> >server, the File>Save menu choice is disabled.  One can,
> >however, do a File>Save As... (Word and Excel are windowed
> >within IE.)  Can (how does) one enable the File>Save menu
> >item?  (IE 5.5, Windows 2000, Office 2000).
>
>My understanding is that you cannot enable File>Save since the clients are
>not doing LOCKing, and therefore there is no guarantee that you have
>exclusive access to the resource.  The semantics of Save are not supported
>without LOCK, so you have to choose File>Save As... and explicitly accept
>the consequences of overwriting an existing resource (i.e., are you
>sure?...)

Snipped...

Received on Sunday, 2 July 2000 17:50:13 UTC