Opening Word from Flash

[John Campbell]

Have any of you folks seen this?

I have a Flash file that has links to word docs.  This works great in every situation except IE on XP.  In that scenario it just flashes a window and closes.

Here are some more odd details.   If the content plays in an LMS content window (i.e. within frames), it won't work.  But if you pop it up, it works fine.  It works fine on all other browsers, including IE on W7 no matter how it's embedded.  

We have tried different ways to link to it (getUrl, ExternalInterface calls to javascript that use window.open, etc).  Nothing works. PDFs work fine.  Just Word docs are busted.  

Anyone run into this?  I hate to force the content to pop up in it's own window, but it may be the only solution.

Thanks in advance.

take care,

jpc

[Ryan Meyer]

I remember running into the same problem years ago. If I remember correctly, it even varied from machine to machine. I don't think we ever nailed down exactly what caused it, or if we did, it ended being a configuration we had no control over. I'm pretty sure we ended up popping up a new window with a message that it could be closed once the doc was opened, and having that pop up the document. Sorry I don't have anything more elegant for you!

-Ryan

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[Philip Hutchison]

Nope, I've never run into that issue.  When I need to link to external files, I normally opt for PDFs since they don't require Word.

The popup window isn't such a bad option, maybe write some conditional code that only does the popup when the browser is IE6 or 7?

Not sure what to do about IE8, though -- IE8 is the only version of IE that works on both XP and Win 7.

- philip

[John Campbell]

We tried everything and just ended up putting a wrapper html file to open the content in a new window.  Bazam, it worked everywhere.  I thought about making it a conditional popup, but as soon as I do that, some case will not work.  XP + IE8 is busted too.   I was going to see if I could trigger off the OS.  W7 is Windows NT 6.1.  Not sure what XP is in the navigator object.

It's very reproducible if you ever want to waste some hours trying to solve it.  :-) Just create a SWF that links to a word doc (local or remote), slam it into a SCORM pkg, and throw up on TestTrack.  Adjust the launch behavior and toggle tests between using frameset and new window.  It (XP) will never open the doc in a frameset. 

This is why I use Macs.  At least Windows 7 seems to have it figured out a bit more.

Thanks,

jpc

[MOLOKO]

Yep, run into this pretty frequently.

It happens not just with Word documents but with anything that causes IE to show an open/save dialog.

Never figured out exactly what combination of settings in IE cause it to happen unfortunately.

Workaround - as I think you've gathered by now - is to link to an HTML page that uses a meta-redirect to automatically jump to the file you're actually interested in showing.

There's a similar bug when linking from Flash to a very long URL that causes it to be truncated; this workaround is good for solving that too.

FYI OS X won't give you this problem - sure. But you can bet you'll just find other problems instead. Slightly fewer than on Windows admittedly, but don't kid yourself that any OS is problem-free!

[Ajay Upadhyaya]

John - An alternate could be to do doc->pdf->swf conversion and then everything can be seamlessly opened inside browser.

-Ajay