Editing documents seamlessly in a Web Application

Question

We have a web application, which involves a lot of documents. In a typical use case, a document will be generated from our web application. The user download the generated document to the local file system and modify it. After this work, the user upload the modified document back to the web application.

I need an easier way, to work with the web application and documents. It should be seamlessly. Maybe, there is a way, to edit the document in a webdav folder similar a sharepoint document list and store it right back in the web application, without storing a temporary document on the local file system.

But maybe, there are better ideas.

P.S: I don't want to use active x controls and it must be a webapplication :-)

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

I don't think this is possible without a plugin. I've used activex in the past, maybe it would be possible to write a cross-platform java applet?

Answer 2

WebDav might be the way to go.

I'd imagine you'd create the file in a folder in the server, then send the user to there, where they could edit and save it.

The drawbacks are:

• Users must have software to edit documents on their machines
• No concurrency handling

An other option would be to generate your documents as HTML then use an HTML Editor (such as FckEditor or FreeTextBox) to let users edit the document online.