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Subject:Re: Linking online doc to an intranet From:Tracy Boyington <tracy_boyington -at- OKVOTECH -dot- ORG> Date:Wed, 16 Sep 1998 15:37:40 -0500
> The question: How do you make a web page running in IE4 start an
> application on a user's hard drive or network drive and cause that
> application to open a particular file?
If I understand what you want, it's pretty much automatic. How automatic
depends on how much control you have over your users' browsers and
settings and what kind of files you want to open.
Netscape (and IE, I assume) will allow you to set associations for
particular file types, and the most common ones are already set. So if
you placed a link to a Word document, and your users' browsers were set
to open Word whenever they clicked on a file that ended in .doc, and you
made sure to use the correct extension on all your files, it's just that
easy. I have done this on an internal network drive with no problems.
But if you have users running a browser that doesn't allow this (and I
don't know which browser that would be) it won't work. And if you're
linking to a type of file that doesn't already appear in the list of
associated file types, you'll have to instruct the users to add it.
Other than that, no big deal!
