2 questions regarding opening EXCEL from a Webfaced App

I found that the STRPCO command does not work in webfacing.  

First Question:  Is it possible to have a DDS function key defined so it opens
EXCEL, instead of having to create a hyperlink somewhere in the APPAREA?

Second Question:  Is it possible to open an EXCEL document from a webfaced app,
in EXCEL and not in the web browser?  I found that once the EXCEL document opens
in the browser, you have to hit the browser back button to return to the
application.  Hitting the back button, causes all sorts of undesirable results.

Thank you! 

NFCO wrote:
> I found that the STRPCO command does not work in webfacing.  
> 
> First Question:  Is it possible to have a DDS function key defined so it
opens EXCEL, instead of having to create a hyperlink somewhere in the APPAREA?
> 
> Second Question:  Is it possible to open an EXCEL document from a webfaced
app, in EXCEL and not in the web browser?  I found that once the EXCEL document
opens in the browser, you have to hit the browser back button to return to the
application.  Hitting the back button, causes all sorts of undesirable results.
> 
> Thank you! 
> 
> Chad


Hi Chad,

A1 :  yes.  I believe that WDSC AE has some facility to assign actions 
to an unused function key but I am not sure that would always be what 
you want (see A2 :-).

A2 :  You could do this by coding up an activex control, but I don't 
have any handy examples on how to do this, nor do I think that it is 
necessarily the best solution for what you want.  I would think that as 
a webapp the best thing would be to deliver the excel doc from an http 
server.  Then when you code the hyperlink to it you can change the 
target window in the hyperlink to put it in a window apart from the one 
being used by the WF webapp in order to avoid any back button issues.

Alternatively if you didn't want to be dependent upon Excel you could 
use one of the Ajax Excel readers on the web (eg. http://us.ajax13.com/ 
) or (if the Excel files are reasonably straight forward) you could 
write an Excel reader and present the data in your own JSP (I have used 
Jakarta's POI project with success for this 
http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/hssf/index.html).

In any case opening in a separate window is probably part of your 
solution for this.