Hyperlinks in Microsoft applications (access, word, excel, etc)

Hello

Hoping someone can help explain the following behaviour.
I have an application that does a series of redirects before hitting
in a login page.

If I insert this application hyperlink to any MS office 2003 product,
say MS Access and click on it I get strange browser session behaviour
with both IE7 and Firefox 2.0.

It seems that clicking on the link in MS Access creates a 'hidden'
browser session with one session id. At the point the redirects hit
the login page and a 200 is returned then an actual broswer window is
opened with a different session and session id. Anything written into
the first session by my application (session variables and cookies)
are lost further down the line due to this break in sessions.

If I click on the link off a web page the session remains constant
throughout.

I was wondering why there is this hidden browser session and is
session url rewriting the only way around this issue?

cheers for any help and advice

Re: Hyperlinks in Microsoft applications (access, word, excel, etc)

"nome" wrote in message
news:1170327234.412100.254470@m58g2000cwm.googlegroups.com.. .
> Hello
>
> Hoping someone can help explain the following behaviour.
> I have an application that does a series of redirects before hitting
> in a login page.
>
> If I insert this application hyperlink to any MS office 2003 product,
> say MS Access and click on it I get strange browser session behaviour
> with both IE7 and Firefox 2.0.
>
> It seems that clicking on the link in MS Access creates a 'hidden'
> browser session with one session id. At the point the redirects hit
> the login page and a 200 is returned then an actual broswer window is
> opened with a different session and session id. Anything written into
> the first session by my application (session variables and cookies)
> are lost further down the line due to this break in sessions.
>
> If I click on the link off a web page the session remains constant
> throughout.
>
> I was wondering why there is this hidden browser session and is
> session url rewriting the only way around this issue?
>
> cheers for any help and advice
>

At the point the link is clicked in an office application the app does not
know what resource type it is going to receive. It doesn't assume it will
be HTML or in some way browser oriented, for all it knows the link could
pull another excel or word document.

The office app will ask the WinInet stack to fetch the resource. WinInet
will then automatically follow any redirects until it gets the final
response.

On realising that a browser is needed the current default browser is
launched and it takes over.

The problem is that temporary (or transient cookies) such as that used to
maintain an ASP Session are stored in process memory. Now that a new
process has been launched (or an existing browser process) has been given
responsiblity for handling the request any subsequent requests will not have
access the cookies previously generated during the redirects.

Anthony.

Re: Hyperlinks in Microsoft applications (access, word, excel, etc)

hi - thanks for the reply.
so there is nothing that can be done then?
cheers

Re: Hyperlinks in Microsoft applications (access, word, excel, etc)

"nome" wrote in message
news:1170342507.785000.177280@p10g2000cwp.googlegroups.com.. .
> hi - thanks for the reply.
> so there is nothing that can be done then?
> cheers
>

Make the link go directly to a page. Then have that page use J(ava)Script
or meta tag to goto the original link you were using.