Feature Request: Ability to not have certain electronic file types locked when opened

posted on April 24, 2016 • Show version history

We would like to store HTML files inside the repository that, when clicked, open and redirect the user to a page (using JavaScript), such as a Laserfiche Form.

This works OK for the most part, except for the fact that Laserfiche locks the HTML file when it is opened, AND fails to unlock it when the user closes the browser window. It remains perpetually locked, and other users get a warning when they try to open that HTML file.

The idea is to store a bunch of HTML files in every user's personal folder that they can double-click to quickly launch a Laserfiche Form to do data-entry. Since opening an HTML file inside the browser doesn't really edit the file, there's no reason Laserfiche should lock that file.

Alternatively, with Web Access, there should be an option to click on a document and get redirected to another web page, instead of having it open as a regular document. Maybe it can read a value from a metadata field and use it as the new window.location.href value.

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posted on April 25, 2016

What if you don't grant users write permission to these documents?

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replied on April 25, 2016

Also, some technical background on why you are seeing this behavior: When the client opens a document for editing, it just uses Windows to launch the associated application and waits for that process to exit. For an HTML document that process can run long after it stops using the original file.

In Web Access, it's very important that we make it clear to the browser that the HTML page that's being opened is not part of the Web Access application. It would be a serious security vulnerability if you could run javascript in the same context as your Web Access session, so we force HTML docs to download rather than opening them in a new tab.

Having a document linked to a URL to redirect to doesn't sound like a use case with enough demand to become a feature, though it might be something you could do with a custom toolbar button.

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replied on April 25, 2016

Thanks Brian. Launching a Form from inside the repository is a VERY common use case for us. Virtually all of our projects involve something along those lines, because we pitch the repository as the "one-stop shop" for everything Laserfiche. If we don't, a lot of people get confused by having to switch between different Laserfiche modules.

Due to the fact that we couldn't get HTML documents to behave reliably, we ended up developing a custom toolbar button. The issue with this is that it also confuses users by introducing a dichotomy between double clicking to open a document vs. selecting the document and then clicking the toolbar button to launch the associated form (the URL for which is encoded into the document's metadata). We want to be able to launch HTML files because then everything is just double-clicked.

The ideal end-game is that each user has a personal folder inside the repository from which they can access everything related to Laserfiche, including Forms they have access to as well as Forms tasks, by double-clicking something in that folder.

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Feature Request: Ability to not have certain electronic file types locked when opened

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