No option to launch visio when clicking on a link to a vsd

[tripptripp5]

I did a search of various newsgroups and forums and didn't
find anything relevant, apologies if this has already been asked and solved and I was
unable to find it. Just point me to the appropriate thread and I will hang
my head in shame.

Here's the deal:

In my company's intranet/wiki, we have various MS office docs linked. For Word, powerpoint, excel, Firefox gives me the option to Open, Save, cancel. I click open and the appropriate app is launched and things are peachy. However, for visio, and visio alone, it only gives me options to save or cancel, not open. This is annoying. The idea here is that I can open the file directly, and not have to go thru the rigmarole of saving it locally, editing, and then searching out the actual network location of the file.

Also, Firefox seems to know that it is a visio document. After clicking on the link to the .vsd, the dialog that pops up shows "you have chosen to open bork.vsd, which is a 'Microsoft Visio Document'".

Visio is set up as the default app for .vsd files. I can double click on them in windows explorere and they open just fine. I don't get why Firefox singles out visio files for saving alone. Is there some configuration I can mess with that will fix this problem?


Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

[the-edmeister]

Do those .vsd files on your company intranet have a MimeType attached?

What Firefox does with files is dependent on their content type (the MIME-type) rather than their file extension. More than likely the web server is sending them as application/octet-stream, which is a generic MIME-type and means "I don't know what this is, you'd better just download it". Firefox unlike IE doesn't guess how to handle a file like that, which is one reason Firefox is more secure.

.

[tripptripp5]

thanks for the reply,



I looked at the mime.types file for the intranet server and application/vnd.visio vsd vst vsw vss is set up. So a mime type should be coming back from the server.

And again, it looks like firefox knows it is a visio file, because the download dialog which gives me the choice of save or download says "this is a Microsoft Visio Document".

Its just weird that it only does this for visio. all other office docs are fine.

[jscher2000]

You could try the MIME Edit extension. More info:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/MimeTypes.rdf - about Fx's MimeTypes file

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4498 - download page for the editor

[tripptripp5]

thats a pretty neat extension, but no dice. I set up the type for open, but still it only shows save and cancel.

Interestingly, if I save the vsd as a vdx (xml visio drawing), it will open. Its almost like firefox just doesn't like the VSD file extension.

[Guest]

Hi,
got the same problem and don't find a solution yet.
mime extension for visio is also in mimetypes.rdf to open vsd-files without asking with program visio.exe

[Guest]

Only solution I've found was to use "OpenDownload" extension, which overrides FireFox's file handling with the OS's, thereby giving you the "Run" option when clicking on a Visio file (.vsd).
http://mozmonkey.com/