Defining Default Open Behavior in Sharepoint 2010 + Office Web Apps with Custom Webpart

Question

I am running Sharepoint 2010 with Office Web Apps. By default, any document of type .doc, .ppt, etc... will open within the browser from the document library. This is fine, however I am using a web part that is pulling in an XML feed that displays a search engine result list that contains URL links to Word and PPT documents.

I would like to have these links behave the same way as they do in the document library (open in browser), however the user is prompted to download these files instead. Is it possible to dictate this behavior in Sharepoint?

Answer 1

Unfortunately I don't think this is possible unless the documents are hosted in SharePoint and the Office Web Applications feature is activated. The in-browser behaviour is made possible by this server-side feature. I assume that the search-engine derived links you are getting will not, in general, be SharePoint hosted documents.

It is possible to open documents in the browser, but this is a client setting and will depend on the client operating system. You say you want to control this from SharePoint, and I can't think of any way you can do this.