[Building Sakai] Clicking resource link in Microsoft Word - you go to 'my workspace'

[Martin B. Smith]

Hello Josh & all,

I believe you'll find that Word likes to follow the link to the first
301/302 redirect response when you're editing the document, and
therefore doesn't work when you are done creating your document. At the
University of Florida, we've also seen this with documents protected by
Shibboleth authentication, as the user follows a few redirects for
authentication before they end up at the actual linked destination.

Cheers,
-- 
Martin B. Smith
smithmb at ufl.edu - (352) 273-1374
CNS/Open Systems Group
University of Florida







Joshua Swink wrote:
> The URL that Word is giving to the browser is to CAS. It doesn't have
> any parameters. It's the same URL that Sakai returns along with its
> "302 Moved Temporarily" response.
> 
> Yes, if you copy and paste it into the browser, it works. OpenOffice also works.
> 
> I'm pretty sure this is a bad behavior of Word.
> 
> Josh
> 
> On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 4:01 PM, Steve Swinsburg
> <steve.swinsburg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Joshua,
>>
>> What's the URL that Word is giving the browser? Does it match the URL
>> thats in the Word doc or is Word eating some of the params?
>> If you copy and paste the URL into the browser, does that work?
>>
>> cheers,
>> Steve
>>
>>
>> On 10/10/2009, at 9:54 AM, Joshua Swink wrote:
>>
>>> If you click on a link in Microsoft Word that goes to a resource, and
>>> log in through CAS, you end up in 'my workspace' instead.
>>>
>>> I am told that newer versions of the CAS client allow you to embed
>>> different destination URLs in the CAS URL, which would solve this
>>> problem.
>>>
>>> What's the status of CAS, and the prognosis on going to newer
>>> versions? Or, does anyone know of a different solution?
>>>
>>> Here's the sequence of events as I understand it:
>>>
>>> * You open a document in Microsoft Word which contains a link to a
>>> resource in Sakai. You ctrl-click on the link.
>>> * Word visits the URL to check it before giving it to your browser.
>>> * Sakai establishes a session, stores the link to the resource in the
>>> session, returns the cookie to Word
>>> * Word eats the cookie, yum
>>> * Word receives the "302 Moved Temporarily" response, and gives the
>>> CAS link to your browser
>>> * Your browser helps you log in and you then go to Sakai,
>>> authenticated.
>>>
>>> The problem is that the session which indicates the resource that you
>>> wanted was eaten by Word. Your browser does not have that cookie. So
>>> you go to your workspace instead.
>>>
>>> OpenOffice doesn't have this problem.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Joshua Swink