How to let users edit documents

There are two ways you can let users edit documents that they store in the attribute of the Document type.

The default approach is to let users download the document, then edit the document outside of Aware IM using the appropriate editor and then let them upload the modified document back into the Document attribute of the business object. When you define an attribute of the Document type Aware IM automatically provides the buttons to upload the document to Aware IM and download it from Aware IM, so this approach is quite straightforward. The disadvantage of this approach is that the user has to perform quite a few steps to modify the document – download, edit and upload back.

An alternative approach is to use Zoho or Office Online document editors to edit/view the document in-place. Zoho (http://www.zoho.com) provides powerful web-based editors to edit many types of documents – MS Word, MS Excel, MS Power Point, Open Office, RTF, HTML etc. The user edits the document using the browser and when he presses the Save button the modified document is automatically saved in Aware IM.

Office Online allows editing Microsoft Office documents only. Just like Zoho the user edits the document using the browser and the changes are automatically saved in Aware IM. To edit documents using Office Online you have to make sure that your server where Aware IM is running meets Microsoft requirements –

1. It has to be added to the Microsoft “WOPI allow list” – please contact Microsoft for this
2. Tomcat has to be setup to run on either port 80 (testing mode only) or port 443 (both testing and production modes)

By default Aware IM runs Office Online in the testing mode. To enable the production mode create the file called oo.props that contains the following property:

DiscoveryUrl=https://onenote.officeapps.live.com/hosting/discovery

Put this file in the AwareIM/Tomcat/webapps/AwareIM directory.

See also this article for more details about putting Office Online in the production mode: https://wopi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/build_test_ship/shipping.html

To enable document editing feature the configurator has to do the following:

1. For Zoho integration make a decision whether their system will use their users’ Zoho account or their own Zoho account. If they want to use their own account they need to register this account with Zoho and then go to the following URL https://zapi.zoho.com to create the API key.
2. Then they need to create an attribute of the Document type as usual, go to the Presentation options of this attribute and tick the “Zoho editing” or “Office Online editing” checkboxes
3. For Zoho integration click the Settings button next to the checkbox and provide the Zoho API key
4. At runtime Aware IM will automatically display the editing button next to the attribute. When the user clicks on this button the corresponding Zoho or Office Online editor will be invoked.
5. If configurators want their users to use their own Zoho account, they will need to define a special attribute in the SystemSettings business object that will hold the Zoho API key. At step 4 they need to provide the name of this attribute, rather than the API key itself. Before the system is used by customers their system administrator will need to perform step 2 to register Zoho API key and set its value into the appropriate attribute of the SystemSettings object.