I'm sure there are many ways of doing this, but here's what I've done:
Web view is used only for previewing documents. Anything which can be
previewed in a web browser is viewable. It is also worth downloading
Quick View Plus, which is a file viewer but which adds additional file
type previewing in browsers.
I do not use any file references in container fields nor do I embed
anything, rather I use fields containing the file location and name
together with two plugins - Troi File and gbpro (www.gbpro.de). The
later does a lot of what Troi File does but also allows the manipulation
of Word/Excel property fields. I could do everything with gbpro and it
provides a few commands not found in Troi File.
If I want to open a file then I use open URL and to print it I use the
gbpFS-FileFolderExecute external command: External (
"gbpFS-FileFolderExecute"; FileNames::FullFileName & "|-print" ) as it
seems to pass the necessary commands over to the application.
I've done some interesting things like use a command line MD5 checksum
generator to compare the checksum with existing checksums in the
database to ensure that the same file isn't imported twice. I had a
look at the MD5 checksum generator from Troi but for some reason or
other as soon as my file size exceeded about 64k (on a network volume)
the performance nosedived from a second or two to 45+ seconds.
The command for the web view function is
"file://"&FileNames::FullFileName - really simple.
I upgraded to Acrobat 8 as it gives quite nice controls over viewing PDF's.
The one thing I don't like about web view for previewing documents is
that the document is live so you can, in some instances, change the data
in the document itself.
To give you some indication of the volume of data I'm up to 1.8gb
totaling 5745 files in 324 folders. My DMS file is 20mb and climbing -
I retain a great deal of meta data and audit information. That
represents 3 years of running my own law practice.
Now that I understand what web view does it has really opened up the
possibilities. The real problem remains FM's inability to handle
multiple windows properly (a little bit like frames in browser if you
follow my meaning) and I don't understand why you can't print a web view.
Regards,
George
