Best practice Solution for exposing Windows file share (UNC path) contents to Perspective users

[lane.duncan]

Some food for thought:

1. If you can move all the files to a database, then the Automation Professionals Blob Server module might be a useful tool. It might be quite a bit of work, but you may end up with a better solution in the long run:

Automation Professionals' Blob Server Module

Automation Professionals is pleased to announce an alpha release of its new Blob Server Module. Available only for Ignition v8.1, here. The Blob Server Module provides a simple way to deliver images, PDF files, or other binary content from a database to your Perspective clients or other web applications. Without needing the WebDev module. All you need is a Named Query that has appropriate security settings and returns a single row with two columns: Content, and ContentType. Modest documentati…

2. You are correct that the browser limitations will be a never ending challenge. Every browser security update can easily turn into a new project. In the long term it may be better to use Vision for this purpose. It doesn’t have to replace the entire system, but perhaps a separate Vision project just for selecting/viewing documentation would be appropriate.

3. Break this task down into separate tasks for each file type. How you handle a PDF might be totally different from how you handle a CAD file.

4. Learning how to build a 3rd party scripting module in Java may open up a lot tools that you can use.

5. I have some scripts that produce custom Excel spreadsheets. I stop my script at system.perspective.download and let the end user figure it out from there. 100% of my end users know how to open a spreadsheet located on the local file system.