Perspective IFrame/PDF Viewer and Shared Network Drives

Hi everyone,

I’m attempting to use the IFrame component to view PDFs for work instructions in a recipe management system. I’d like to use the perspective PDF Viewer but it seems to be incomplete, un-zoomable, no built-in controls, page numbers move off the component and overlap on other components, etc., so I decided to go with the IFrame.

The problem we are running into is that the IFrame and PDF Viewer in perspective cannot access shared network drives, whereas the PDF Viewer in Vision is able to. Since the shared network drives are accessible from the gateway, I figured this should be possible. Is this related to Perspective being in a browser, or does some kind of Webdev mounting need to happen? Incidentally, we tried Webdev mounting of a shared drive but the shared drives did not appear.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Cheers,
Roger

Network shares that are to be accessible from a Windows-based Ignition server need extra setup in ignition.conf, due to Windows’ service architecture. See this part of the manual:

https://docs.inductiveautomation.com/display/DOC80/Mapping+a+Network+Drive

Also note that WebDev mounting of a folder does not yield a browser-viewable folder. Only direct access to known file names will work.

1 Like

Thanks! This is what I was looking for.

We’ll see if mapping the network drive in the ignition.conf file will allow perspective to view them. As for the latter, it looks like someone will need to manually input hundreds of mounted files from that shared drive in that case. As long as we can get these files into the viewers, we’re good.

Cheers,
Roger

A Perspective script could scan the network share to obtain the necessary filenames and present them for use in the IFrames. Only the IFrame would be limited to actual file names.

Hey @roger_larson,

I am having the same trouble for perspective pdf viewer. I have gone through mapping doc but didnt find any success. can you share your insights on whether it is done on your side or not. Or maybe i need to approach different solution.

Hi Sourabh,

We were able to get a mounted network shared drive set up that Ignition can talk to, store files onto it (from user upload), and display those files by referencing the file share URL. We also have an internal website that displays PDF files, and we can just embed that URL into the Perspective PDF Viewer which works very well for us and was easier to use. This is a late reply, but hopefully you were able to get it on your end!

Cheers,
Roger