[SalesForce] View office file in visualforce page

Is there a way to view a microsoft office document in a visualforce page?

The files are Attachments of a custom object and I need to open a viewer for them.

I tried to use the field Body of the Attachment and render it in a visualforce page rendered as PDF. But it didn't work.

Any suggestions?

Best Answer

Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint .doc/.xls/.ppt is a pretty awkward binary format and the newer .docx/.xlsx/.pptx is zipped XML but still complicated enough. So platforms like Salesforce do not have viewing or conversion capability for all these formats built in.

A reliable way to view these documents is to get your clients to install the free viewers that Microsoft provides if they don't have an Office license. Then as long as the attachments have the correct content type set (which AFAIK they will if manually uploaded from a correct extension file) a link in your Visualforce like this:

<apex:outputLink value="{!URLFOR($Action.Attachment.Download, attachment.id)}">
    Download/View
</apex:outputLink>

will download the attachment and if their browser is configured to "Always Open Files of this Type" (that is an option in Chrome) the attachment will be automatically opened in the correct viewer.

Related Solutions

[SalesForce] visualforce page pdf record data

This is because if your page thats been rendered as PDF if uses standard controller ,you need to set Id parameters for the same and also use setredirect(true)

Sample code is as follows

 PageReference pdf = Page.Footer_Helitene;
 pdf.getParameters().put('id',o.Id); /Set oportunity Id here 
 pdf.setRedirect(true);//Set redirect to true to be on safer side
 //Rest of your code

[SalesForce] Text file download in Visualforce page

Try adding the download attribute to your link. You can read about this attributte on the Mozilla Developer Network. It notifies the browser to treat the url as a file download, and works with base64 data urls.

This snippet downloads a plaintext file for me.

<a href="data:text/plain;charset=utf-8;base64,{!FileContents}" download="description.txt">Download</a>

This snippet also uses the same encoding method as you do in your controller.

public String getFileContents() {
    return EncodingUtil.base64Encode(Blob.valueOf(description));
}

If clicking on the link you are currently using doesn't at least bring you to a page with the text content you are using on the page, then you may have a deeper issue you will need to identify.

Additionally, you can use <apex:outputLink>..</apex:outputLink> to generate the link. The html- prefix will pass any given attribute over to the generated html content, allowing you to access the download attribute through visualforce.

<apex:outputLink value="data:text/plain;charset=utf-8;base64,{!FileContents}" html-download="description.txt">Download.. </apex:outputLink>

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[SalesForce] visualforce page pdf record data

[SalesForce] Text file download in Visualforce page

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