InLine Display of Media Object File Attachments with Edge or Chrome

Larry_Jones

Larry_Jones

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As part of our 9.2 Upgrade we're planning on dropping IE (with its ActiveX).
We were planning on allowing users to use either Edge or Chrome.

We just noticed a snag though with Edge or Chrome (or Firefox).

When PDFs are attached as a File MO Type they are not displayable in the Media Object Viewer. Ditto for most other types of files (Word, Excel, ...). (Image files such as JPEGs do display in the viewer.)

What happens instead is that the user sees the message "This media object is not viewable because of settings on your browser. Please download the media object file to your local machine to view with an appropriate application." and the file is downloaded to the user's Downloads directory - basically requiring multiple clicks on the user's part just to view a PDF.
Alternatively the user can press Control-Click to open a separate window or tab but this is also less desirable than opening directly in the Viewer.

This is not going to be popular with our end-user population - particularly Mfg production people who barely know their way around a computer.

(FYI we have chosen NOT to store our considerable (hundreds of thousands) of attachments in the database as Oracle attempted to push its customers into.)

Oracle has a enhancement request to address this but after several years they haven't addressed it.

So ... does anyone have a work-around / fix for this?
 
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Apparently all files are now attached as type Image (5), maybe that would change how it works?
 
This doesn't help you at all, but I think the Edge browser works the same way (but we have ActiveX turned off, so maybe with it turned on Edge would work differently).
 
I want to say the last time I gave up on this, it was because there was some sort of browser security that prevents opening certain file types automatically and the type in F00165 didn't really matter at all. The attachment manager is a way around that, but like you - I'm a little queasy of throwing away tons of db space on X amount of years of attachments that nobody would ever let me clean up (we really need that PO attachment from 1985, it's the lynch pin of our business!)

I know this helps basically not at all, but if I get some time tomorrow I'll see if I can find my notes.
 
Just an idea: if this traffic is routed through an F5 (or any other load balancer / reverse proxy server), it can be set up to transparently replace "Content-Disposition: attachment" with "Content-Disposition: inline" on the fly. That would be an extra step, but would likely prove to be a solution. And it only needs to be done once. Can anyone try and tell us if this worked?
 
Alex,

great idea. The only Load Balancer we have though is Everest Software's SSO product. Can it do that?
 
Not really, because it balances by sending clients to a random server from a list (i.e.: round-robin). It does however include a reverse-proxy component, but we generally do not push it, because it would then become a critical single point of failure risk.

On the other hand, either Apache or IIS can be setup as reverse proxy. But then it would become a bigger set up effort...
 
Interestingly enough, I just looked at JDE Java code in some old TR and saw it actually alternating between attachment / inline based on that same INI setting. Possibly in a wrong place, if it's not actually doing it - I expect that there are a few pieces of code that would be used in different scenarios.
 
As part of our 9.2 Upgrade we're planning on dropping IE (with its ActiveX).
We were planning on allowing users to use either Edge or Chrome.

We just noticed a snag though with Edge or Chrome (or Firefox).

When PDFs are attached as a File MO Type they are not displayable in the Media Object Viewer. Ditto for most other types of files (Word, Excel, ...). (Image files such as JPEGs do display in the viewer.)

What happens instead is that the user sees the message "This media object is not viewable because of settings on your browser. Please download the media object file to your local machine to view with an appropriate application." and the file is downloaded to the user's Downloads directory - basically requiring multiple clicks on the user's part just to view a PDF.
Alternatively the user can press Control-Click to open a separate window or tab but this is also less desirable than opening directly in the Viewer.

This is not going to be popular with our end-user population - particularly Mfg production people who barely know their way around a computer.

(FYI we have chosen NOT to store our considerable (hundreds of thousands) of attachments in the database as Oracle attempted to push its customers into.)

Oracle has a enhancement request to address this but after several years they haven't addressed it.

So ... does anyone have a work-around / fix for this?

I know it's an old message, but I believe there's still no solution, hence I just wanted to mention that we have recently released MO Viewer++ solution that can display most file types inline, including PDF (natively) and DOC & DOCX (displaying a converted document). I.e.:

1644387250555.png

This side bar can of course be easily attached to any APPL in JDE.
 
I know it's an old message, but I believe there's still no solution, hence I just wanted to mention that we have recently released MO Viewer++ solution that can display most file types inline, including PDF (natively) and DOC & DOCX (displaying a converted document). I.e.:

View attachment 19268

This side bar can of course be easily attached to any APPL in JDE.
Hi Alex, is this hence working with Edge?... and how can I set it up.
 
Hi Alex, is this hence working with Edge?... and how can I set it up.
Yes, with any browser. It installs as a Windows Service, very easy, but you'll need to find a good home for it, i.e.: a new dedicated VM would be ideal. You can PM me for a demo, etc. Here's another example:
1645062445003.png
 
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