WebDAV

With the BlueSpice WebDAV integration you can open, edit and save files from your wiki directly in their native applications. After saving, the files are automatically updated and versioned in the wiki.

Editing options

With WebDAV, you have two editing options for files:

1. Open the file in the wiki and edit it in the Office application
2. Open the file using your local file explorer (for example, Windows Explorer) and edit it in the Office application. This requires a connection between the WebDAV server and your local file explorer. The wiki file directories are then mapped like a network drive.

 With WebDAV you can work on OpenDocument files or Microsoft Office files such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint in their associated programs. You can also exchange image formats such as jpg, gif or png and PDF files directly with the wiki via your WebDAV connection.

The supported file formats also depend on your wiki configuration.

Opening a file via the browser   

 To open a file directly from the wiki, hold down the control key and right-click on a file link to open the context menu. If the browser context menu is displayed instead of the wiki context menu, simply click with the right mouse button without holding down the control key. You can adjust this behavior in your settings under Appearance > Context menu. After saving the file, you can see the latest version on the file page.         

Associating file types with their applications   

 When you open a file for the first time via the context menu, you may have to associate the necessary application and the file type in your browser. For example, Excel may not open here if you have never opened an Excel file in the browser. However, this changes after you have linked the Excel file extension with the Excel application. If you then get an error message in Excel, go to the browser settings and change the application for the content type ms-excel to Standard (this is the procedure for Firefox as an example). The file can then be opened and edited directly in Excel.

OpenDocument files

OpenDocument files are linked to the corresponding Microsoft Office applications and are opened there by default. You can change your browser settings and associate the ms-word content type with LibreOffice. Afterwards, both OpenDocument text documents and Microsoft Word documents are opened in LibreOffice.

Opening files via Windows Explorer     

With WebDAV, you can also open a file on the wiki in your Windows Explorer. You simply need to specify the wiki as a network drive. These are the necessary steps under Windows 10:       

First you need your personal WebDAV path. Go to your Preferences, tab User profile. If you don't see the WebDAV path here, contact your wiki administrator.

1. Copy your personal WebDAV URL from your user preferences page.
2. Open Windows Explorer.
3. Right-click This PC> Map Network Drive.
4. Paste the URL from your clipboard into the text field and select a free drive of your choice. For example W for Wiki. Make sure that you did not paste any spaces at the beginning of the URL. Make sure to remove them.
5. Click Finish.

Enter your wiki username and password. This is only necessary if you use your own wiki password. If your wiki uses single sign-on or LDAP for authentication, you will not be asked for a password at this point.

You can then rename the network label if you like.

       

Edit wiki pages via WebDAV     Now you see the namespaces to which you have view permissions in the wiki. The Pages folder contains all wiki pages in the main namespace, for example the start page. The pages have the ending .wiki.

In theory, you can change a wiki page locally and then save it. To do this, select a simple text editor and edit the page content in wikitext format. The changes are automatically displayed live in the wiki.

The version history of the page indicates that this version was edited via WebDAV.

       

Open a file from the file page     When you open a file from the file page, you can left-click or right-click to open the file. As we have seen, right-clicking opens the file via WebDAV and saves it directly to the wiki.

A left-click also open the associated application immediately. But here, the file is saved as a local file and you need to manually save the file back to the wiki. You can either save the file locally and manually upload it back into the wiki, or you can save the page directly in the wiki via WebDAV in Windows Explorer.

       

Subpages     Here I am creating a subpage in the wiki for the page "Edit file" called "Example". This page is then displayed in Windows Explorer in a subfolder that is named after the parent page.         

Conclusion wiki pages     In general, it makes more sense to edit wiki pages directly in the wiki, since they can be edited more comfortably in visual editing mode.

There, you also have access to important meta information, for example whether a page is locked for editing or whether other users are currently editing the page.

       

Editing office documents     Now, where can you find the Office documents that are stored in the wiki and that you want to edit via WebDAV?         

   These documents are located in the folder Media. This directory lists all files that you can now edit locally using an Office application to then save them directly in the wiki.         

Namespace folders     If the extension NSFileRepo is installed in your wiki, you see the uploaded files organized in folders. These folders correspond to the namespace associations of the files in the wiki.

The files without a specific namespace association, that is the files in the main namespace are located in the folder (Main).

       

   Let me open a PowerPoint file and save it. As expected, it was versioned directly in the wiki.

As an alternative, I can open the file directly with a left-click. The file is now saved locally. I am now manually saving the file back to the wiki using Windows Explorer. Here I have to make sure that I am saving the file back into the correct namespace and with the original filename.

       

Versioning     I check the wiki and see the latest version entry.         

Uploading files     With WebDAV, You can also quickly upload multiple files to the wiki.         

Create a wiki page     You can also create wiki pages. Simply create a page with the extension .wiki in the editor. Make sure that you are not creating a text file with the extension .txt, but a file with the extension .wiki.         

Delete     Pages that are deleted via WebDAV are marked accordingly in the delete log.         

Copy     It is also possible to copy a document into a different namespace, because documents and wiki pages can exist in different namespaces with the same file name.         

Move/rename     If you try to rename a wiki page or a file using Windows Explorer in the same folder or if you want to move it to a different namespace, you will receive an error message. In this case, moving or renaming a page must be done by moving the page directly on the wiki.         

Summary     Let's summarize:

With WebDAV, office documents in the wiki can be edited directly in their native applications so that you don't have to manualle download and re-upload them.

Files are versioned accordingly and the version is marked as a WebDAV change.

Files can be opened from the browser or from Windows Explorer.

Wiki pages should not be edited using a text editor. They are better suited for direct browser editing.

Files that are deleted from Windows Explorer can be tracked in the delete log.

Files that are added from Windows Explorer can be tracked in the upload log.

       

End     Before you upload a large number of documents to your wiki, check with your wiki administrator which files should be maintained in the wiki and which files are better maintained in other systems.