Opening a word document on clients PC, through a PHP application

I am developing a web applic开发者_开发技巧ation in PHP as a replacement of Microsoft Access based application for a company.

In old access application in their database they were storing a link to a word document, which further links to other documents. Now in access form they are showing that link, when click on that link they can open the word document from a common folder in a network PC and make any changes the that file (pretty easy for user).

Is there any way to do the same through the web-based application?

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What if I just move the common folder in my www directory?

In that case they can open the file easily, but if they have to make any change they have to download the file on their PC, and the changes will be done to their local file not in the file that is on server. So they need to move file to server back or ask network admin for moving the file back to the server

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What if I keep common folder in a network PC it self and try to access it form there?

Just by clicking I can’t open a file form client’s or any other network PC. For this when click on the link I have to open & read file through PHP on web server. Using any document to PDF converter, I have to convert the file format and then open it in browser. Here the problem are,

• Still I can’t make changes in file and
• I have to fix about the format that I might need to convert in PDF.
• I am not sure how the other documents that are linked to the main document will work.

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There's two ways of doing this: (a) let the user download it from your web application, either statically (stored on the web server) or dynamically (processed in PHP or even built in real-time).

Or, (b) use a file link to a known location on the user's disk, such as file://C:/mydoc.doc.

Addendum - if you want to write to the file in your web app, but also have the user open the same copy, use (b) rather than (a). This presumes that the location of the file is available through a local or network path.