I have a ASP.MVC app running in my company's domain. I would like to make links to Word, Excel or even to folders. For example I would like to allow user to access a project folder on public drive or Office document. Files and web app are on different servers, but in same domain.
The problem is that all modern browsers block access to local files. (Chrome throws an error saying "Not allowed to load local resource: file://..."). IE we are currently still using does allow that, but I can't rely on this.
How to tell the browser that it is safe to open those links?
I read about an option to serve .url files to user with link to file/folder. The downside is that I'd fill users temp folders with .url files. And also while I was testing this, I couldn't make changes to .url file after I saved it. Even removing the file doesn't help. It looks like windows stores it somewhere.
Another option was to make an a-tag with href like "data:text/plain;charset=utf-8..." and offer user to download .url file that way. But it was somehow not working for me.
Please help.
Thank you.