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My organization uses Microsoft extensively, Sharepoint Online, Office 365, etc. I want a web application to render Word and Excel documents by converting to PDF. I read where a page at office.com can be opened, including the URL of a document, and it will be rendered. Can someone please elaborate on this functionality? The documents are blobs on an SQL Server. Ideally I would like to use HTTP post to send documents to a web address, have it render, and stay within the organization/Microsoft security environment.
You could use the Microsoft Graph to save the document to the user's OneDrive, convert the document to PDF, and then delete the original. The API used to convert the format of a file in OneDrive is Convert Content. The response from this request includes the URL to the converted document.
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Hi @David McDivitt ,
What you are referring to may be WOPI. The WOPI protocol enables office web apps (Word, PowerPoint and Excel) to view and edit documents with in a 3rd party web app page. This is useful in situations where you can manage the documents i.e. a file server host application. It sounds like your SQL Server blob solution would fit this scenario.
Are you planning to use the Microsoft cloud provided Office web apps? If so, in order to use a solution with the WOPI protocol, you would need to work with our Cloud Storage Partner Program, information is here:
https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/microsoft-365/cloud-storage-partner-program/online/
If you are able to use an on-premises solution and can deploy Office Online Server in your enterprise, then you can implement this independently. There is information about deploying OOS here:
https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/officeonlineserver/office-online-server
You can read about the WOPI protocol here:
https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/openspecs/office_protocols/ms-wopi/6a8bb410-68ad-47e4-9dc3-6cf29c6b046b - this is the technical specification
https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/microsoft-365/cloud-storage-partner-program/rest/ - this is a helpful reference for cloud integration
There's also helpful information in the first link for both cloud and on-premises integrations, including a reference to a sample host implementation on github which I've linked here:
https://github.com/Microsoft/Office-Online-Test-Tools-and-Documentation/tree/master/samples/SampleWopiHandler
If you go the on-premises route, questions about the [MS-WOPI] technical specification can be direct to this Q&A forum.
If you go the cloud route, there is a yammer group available to participants after joining.
I hope this information helps.
Best regards,
Tom Jebo
Sr Escalation Engineer
Microsoft Open Specifications Support
@Tom Jebo , We have Sharepoint on-premises, Sharepoint Online, and are converting to online, Office 365, OneDrive, etc. When Word documents are viewed in Sharepoint Online they open with an online Word app. I don't want edit capability. I want to render them only. We have no third party software and work with Microsoft directly. We make many Java and .Net web apps for our own business use. I want to add Word and Excel viewing capability. I can stream a saved PDF from a blob out to the client and it renders because modern browsers have that capability. Word and Excel documents download and do not render. To do what I want I can either convert Word and Excel documents to PDF and render the way already done, or send to a servicing page, i.e. Word app, and have it do the work.
@David McDivitt If you implement a WOPI host server and use the WOPI protocol, you will have the same Word PDF viewer app as an action for PDF files. But it sounds like your question is more about how to convert the .docx and .xlsx files to PDF and render without having to download. Is that correct? As far as I know, the WOPI protocol does not have an endpoint for conversion to PDF for either Word or Excel (there are endpoints for convert to binary format i.e. .doc and .xls and .csv). So the PDF files would have to exist already.
Regarding other solutions using Sharepoint, I would have to defer to the Sharepoint and Office web apps folks and have added the tag for those teams.
@Tom Jebo , I can make a service to serve out a blob from the database as if it was a file. That's no problem. Instead of a URL pulling a file from file storage it would pull a blob and render the same way. I don't care whether I convert to PDF or display through an Office web app, I just want to display the Word or Excel document without having to download and have all work remain within the browser. It sounds like a WOPI server can be installed. Is that true? Might we already have that functionality through office.com in some way or the same Office web apps Sharepoint Online uses?
@David McDivitt a WOPI host would have to be implemented (see the example in my links above) and deployed as a replacement for Sharepoint (or alongside Sharepoint but replacing the file serving and front end viewing features in a separate web application). There is no product or feature you can just install to do this. The WOPI server you implement would then talk to Office Online Server or Office Online (Microsoft 365 cloud server) via the WOPI protocol, and the two of them working together to render Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in the WOPI server's web app page. Sharepoint would be out of the picture at least for the functionality you're talking about. If you don't want to do that, and would still like Sharepoint to do all the file serving and front end UI, then you may want to take advice from the Sharepoint folks (someone just replied).
Tom