Warning: there's a bit of Lotuscript & HTML code in this entry if you're not interested in Notes/Domino development then you might want to skip this one...

You may remember from an earlier posting we're using Ben's dominoWiki in our shiny new work Intranet (I've been a permie for a while now )

Someone asked if they could link to a network share using unc syntax from a dominoWiki page.   For example I might want to link to a shared directory containing some interesting files.  This would be the equivalent of typing the following in the browsers address bar:

file://///myserver/myshare

or

creating an HTML link like

<a href="file://///myserver/myshare">my interesting files</a>

or

\\myserver\myshare

dominoWiki doesn't seem to support this out of the box.  We tried all sorts of tag combinations <nowiki> <code> etc and couldn't get it to work.

So a quick dip into the code to find the function that handles stuff between single brackets [ ].  The function is declared in the script library wiki.class (declarations section) as follows:

Public Function convertSingleBracket (txt As String) As String

It handles quite a few protocols http, https, ftp and so on but "file" is a reserved dominoWiki word to enable linking to attachments on a page.  I didn't want to lose that functionality so I extended the convertSingleBracket function with a new protocol:  unc:// as in [unc://myserver/myshare my interesting files].

The function uses Select Case to process each protocol so I added:

        Case "unc"
            newText = |<a class="wiki-| + protocolText + |link" href="file:///| & Right(leftText,Len(leftText)-Len("unc://")) & |">|
            If (rightText = "") Then
                newText = newText & leftText & |</a>|
            Else
                newText = newText & rightText & |</a>|
            End If

Just before the Case Else statement.

Now when you add something like [unc://myserver/myshare my intersting files] to a dominoWiki page, save and view the page the HTML is <a href="file://///myserver/myshare">my interesting files</a>.

This works out of the box for IE but not for FireFox (and possibly other browsers) I think to try and prevent exploits that might allow external parties to grab usernames/passwords or similar.  But there is a workaround or two.  You can tell Firefox to trusting file links to local files when the page comes from a particular domain (like your intranet).

Workaround 1:
Create a  file called user.js in your firefox profile directory (if you don't know where that is look here) the file should be plain text and contain these three lines:

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "<INSERT_YOUR_INTRANET_FQDN_HERE>");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

for example

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "http://intranet.jasonhookonline.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

Save the file and restart Firefox.  For more information try these pages Very readable explanation (look for the heading "Firefox 1.5 and local files") or more comprehensive explanation.

Workaround 2:
Install a Firefox add-on called localLink.  Which allows you to right click on a link that executes file:/// and open the link via a menu.

OK so neither workaround is great but they work!

That's it I think.  Time to go home
Jason