tl; dr: Is it possible without installing additional software on the client (e.g. proprietary protocol handlers, browser plugins etc.) to link to a document's WebDAV URL on a web page and have the browser starting the associated application (in my case limited to MS Office or LibreOffice) and having the application reading the document directly from the WebDAV URL? My usage scenario is limited to MS Office documents, but it is important that the solution also works if LibreOffice instead of MS Office is installed on the client as the application configured to handle MS Office documents.
The most obvious solution to simply place a link to the WebDAV URL on the web page does not work. The browser does not realize that it is not a plain HTTP URL and shows its regular 'do you want to download or open this file' behaviour. If I open the document from the browser, the browser still downloads the document to a temporary folder and starts the associated application in such a way that the downloaded document is opened from the temp folder. The relevant difference is that if you edit and save the document, it is only saved back to the temp folder on the client and not saved to the original WebDAV URL as intended.
I find it a little bit strange that I seem to be the only one having this problem, I have at least not found much information or discussion when searching the net.
I few close, but not quite fitting solutions are:
The WebDAV AJAX library from IT Hit. The library offers a JavaScript API to do exactly what I need. If I ignore that the library is quite expensive, it does however require additional software to be installed on the client, which in my case is not acceptable.
Confluence is according to the documentation offering the functionality I request, also without installing additional software on the client, but I have found no details on how it is actually solved technically.
MS Office installs by default protocol handlers, which allows me to use URLs like ms-word:ofe|u|https://my.webdav.server/path/to/doducment.docx on the web page. Some discussions on the internet seem to indicate that LibreOffice is supposed to support these URLs, but my tests show that it is not the case, not even under Windows.
LibreOffice installs (at least under Windows, allegedly not under Linux) a protocol handler for vnd.libreoffice.command. I could alternate between ms-word:ofe|u| and vnd.libreoffice.command and almost achieve what I am looking for, but there is no JavaScript API to query the installed protocol handlers, so I have no way to check which office suite is installed on the client machine and decide which of the two protocol handlers I can use.
Anyone out there with a better suggestion how to achieve this?