Launching an application from a link in SharePoint

When you are viewing lists of items in SharePoint, the context menu is fantastic as it allows you to edit documents directly from certain native applications. For example with a Word document you are able to select ‘Edit In Microsoft Word’ from the context menu, which when clicked fires up Microsoft Word and enables you to edit the document. However when you start creating your own custom webparts from SharePoint list items, you lose this ability. Today I had the challenge of providing a link to a document that was stored in a SharePoint list, but I needed to be able to fire the document up directly from the link.

 

After quite a bit of trawling through the web I found this great article which really got me going in the right direction:

http://wiki.threewill.com/display/is/2007/10/.

Basically you need to call a javascript method called dispex() which will open the application for you (instead of opening the document as read only).

So within my code I already had my Hyperlink control (lnkDocumentDownload) which was populated by an SPListItem. This also has the URL of the document set in lnkDocumentDownload.NavigateUrl. This needs to be set for this to work, and of course for applications that don’t have integration with SharePoint, they will just use this link to go to the document.

What I needed to additionally add to enable the launching of the application was:

lnkDocumentDownload.Attributes.Add(“onfocus”, “OnLink(this)”);
lnkDocumentDownload.Attributes.Add( “onclick”, @”DispEx(this,event,’TRUE’,’FALSE’,’FALSE’,’SharePoint.OpenDocuments.3′,’0′,’SharePoint.OpenDocuments’,”,”,”,’2′,’0′,’0′,’0x7fffffffffffffff’)”);

Once I added this in, whenever I clicked the link in my control, it would behave in the same way as clicking on ‘Edit in Microsoft Word’.

I also found some ‘kind of’ (not really) helpful documentation on the javascript methods on the Microsoft website here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc264013.aspx