Re: Editing Word Documents

On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, David Russell wrote: > I have just had a request about editing Word Documents... > > I have an intranet, which provides access to, amongst others, Word > Documents about policies, etc. What the guys are looking for is a way to > do the following: > > 1. Show a list of files available for editing > 2. If a file is clicked, then it is locked for other users (no access) > 3. The file opens on the client's machine > 4. The client edits it > 5. The client then closes the file, it "auto-saves" and he goes about > his business. > > Points 1 through 3 are relatively trivial. Point 4 and 5 (especially 5) > have me lost. > > How do you get a file to be edited, and then automatically returned to > the server by M$ Word in it's changed format. Is this possible? > > How would this change in a database-backended system (including the > files as BLOBs)? Assuming you're using Apache, you can use mod_dav (http://www.webdav.org/) to provide read/write access to files for clients with newer operating systems (WinXP, OSX, maybe a few earlier versions) over HTTP. Combine this with a simple locking mechanism in your database (i.e., update file set locked='1' and lockedat=now() and lockedby=$user where file_id=$file) and you're good to go. miguel