MS Excel and Power Point cannot properly open local hosted file through WebDAV

Question

I am currently making a project with WebDAV to make some kind of Document Management System. It is an ASP .NET Web Application, hosted in IIS. (Although it's not using IIS WebDAV, but a modification of this project: http://mvc4webdav.codeplex.com/

For the last few months, it was working properly, but a few days ago, Excel and PowerPoint behave wrongly.

I was using the FFWinplugin or the Sharepoint ActiveXObject (the OpenDocument Control) depending on the browser.

When the user clicks on the document link, it will trigger this function:

function editDocument(event, path) {
    event.preventDefault();
    if (fNewDoc) {
        if (!EditDocumentButton.EditDocument(path)) {
            alert(L_EditDocumentRuntimeError_Text);
        }
    } else {
        try {
            //************************ This part works for word but not excel or power point
            //var ffWinPlugin = document.getElementById("winFirefoxPlugin");
            //var ov = ffWinPlugin.GetOfficeVersion();
            // ffWinPlugin.EditDocument(path, ov);
            //*********************************
            window.location.replace('ms-powerpoint:ofe|u|' + path); //But this works for excel and powerpoint 
        } catch (e) {
            alert(L_EditDocumentError_Text);
        }
    }
}

fNewDoc was a flag I set up at page load to determine whether the OpenDocument Control was initialized or not in IE.

The path is something like:

http://localhost/appName/EditDocument/cb72e81f-fb9c-40af-962b-aa981b79bb72/Test.pptx

The problem is this:

When I try to open an Excel/PowerPoint file by calling the EditDocument function above, using the FFWinPlugin or OpenDocument, it is not opened for editing properly. Both just open without protected view but cannot be edited.

In Excel, it does not show read-only mode, but when I tried saving, it says Document not Saved.
In PowerPoint, it opens in read-only mode.

I debugged to see the WebDAV Requests that was made, and it turns out that both of them only requests PROPFIND over and over again after the first OPTIONS.

While if I use the window.location.replace(.....), all 3 application (Word, Excel, PP) opens the documents fine, in protected view, and can be edited. Also, it follows the usual WebDAV Request cycle (OPTIONS-HEAD-OPTIONS-LOCK-GET-PROPFIND-UNLOCK). If I enable editing, it works just fine.

I tested the application first on Office 2013 (365), and for backward compatibility, I installed Office 2010 (I looked up online, and I know afterwards that this was a bad idea to have them side by side). And this whole problem occurs after I uninstalled the 2010 version a while ago.

I tested it on another computer, the problem did not occur. Tested also on an online WebDAV demo, and no problem occured as well. So it appears that the problem only happens between Excel/PowerPoint and the localhost.

I could have just use the working method to fix this, but it will make it inflexible, since I will have to have lots of if-else statement to determine which ms office application to use. While if I use the FFWinPlugin I don't have to take care of that. So I really want to know what's happening, but I have got nothing after looking up online for a while.

How can I fix this? At first I thought that the Office 2013 installation was corrupted after uninstalling 2010, but it works when not using the FFWinplugin. So, now I am not sure what went wrong.

MS Excel and Power Point cannot properly open local hosted file through WebDAV

0 Answers0