I have tried every which way and cannot get Link.Open to open a network file system location.

If I manually enter the following into a browser:
    \\loc.something.com.au\datashare\path\to\file\515_message.html

It works and shows the file contents to me, as does:
    file:\\loc.something.com.au\datashare\path\to\file\515_message.html

But when I try to use File.Open it considers both of these to be a relative link and prepends it with the current path causing something like this.
    http://localhost:234/file:\\loc.something.com.au\datashare\path\to\file\515_message.html

File.Open with www.google.com works as expected but always fails with the NFS.

I'm getting desparate, can anyone please help me get a simple link working here. I don't want to give the web server user permissions to the network file system so downloading & streaming the file to the client isn't an option.

Thanks,
Scott.

Thank you.

This works correctly on the dev environment but I get strange behaviour after I deploy to a server:

• IE8 - Works correctly
• Firefox9 - Does nothing
• Chrome - Opens an empty browser window but doesn't load the files

I've turned off all the popup blocking but nothing seems to fix it for the other browsers.

Any suggestions :)

Hi Scott,

This is some kind of browser security issue that you have hit here, and despite repeated attempts, I wasn't able to find any solution. There are multiple reports of this problem that I noticed during my Googling, but no definite solution.

Visual WebGui does actually play no role in this problem, and you should test this and try finding a workaround by not going through Visual WebGui for starters, so you can concentrate on the problem at hand. You can do this for instance by placing an HtmlBox inside your Visual WebGui form, and then set it's contents using the following:

this.htmlBox1.Html = "<a href=\"\" onclick=\"window.open('file://YourDNS/YourShare/YourFile.txt');return false;\">Open File</a>";
 

You can also create an Html page within your project, bypassing Visual WebGui altogether and placing the following inside the body:

<a href="" onclick="window.open('file://YourDNS/YourShare/YourFile.txt');return false;">Open File</a>
 

Both of these tests failed in my environment.

I will ask around if someone knows how to work around this in JavaScript and if I do, I will post my results here.

Palli