Accessing Documents

One of the main challenges when integrating the Author Component applet in your SharePoint site is to avoid authenticating twice when opening a document resource stored in your SharePoint repository.

You have already signed in when you started the SharePoint session, but the applet is not aware of your current session. In this case every time the applet is accessing a document it will ask you to input your credentials again.

As a possible solution, do not execute HTTP requests directly from the Java code, but forward them to the web browser that hosts the applet, because it is aware of the current user session (authentication cookies).

To open documents stored on your SharePoint repository, register your own protocol handler to the JVM. We implemented a handler for both http and https protocols that forwards the HTTP requests to a JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object. This way, the browser that executes the JavaScript code is responsible for handling the authentication to the SharePoint site.

To install this handler, add the following line to your Java Applet code (in our case, in the ro.sync.ecss.samples.AuthorComponentSampleApplet class):

URL.setURLStreamHandlerFactory(new ro.sync.net.protocol.http.handlers.CustomURLStreamHandlerFactory(this));

To enable JavaScript calls from your Java applet code, set the MAYSCRIPT attribute to true in the <applet> element embedded in you HTML page:

<applet width="100%" height="600"
  code="ro.sync.ecss.samples.AuthorComponentSampleApplet"
  name="authorComponentAppletName" id="authorComponentApplet" 
  MAYSCRIPT="true">
    .....
</applet>

Tip: If the applet is not working, or you cannot open documents from your SharePoint repository, enable the debugging tools that come bundled with your Web Browser or the Java Console from your operating system to try to identify the cause of the problem.