Powerpoint Presentation In An IFRAME

I have a PowerPoint presentation stored as a BLOB in an Oracle database. After quite awhile of fighting, I finally have a servlet that returns the presentation. Yay me.

However, a basic HTML issue seems to be hitting me. I am trying to display the CBT in an IFRAME, but it refuses to do so. Instead, it wants to open PowerPoint to display the presentation.

Here's the offending code chunk from the JSP:

(Note: for those of you unfamiliar with the Struts taglib, this renders as this:

)

Can anyone tell me how to get this to display in the IFRAME?

A couple of notes:
- I am not able to convert to Flash or HTML. The Use Case REQUIRES PowerPoint.
- People accessing the application WILL have PowerPoint installed on their workstation.

I don't think you are going to be able to do that. If I am understanding your issue correctly, when you return the response to the main window, the browser (if configured as such) will use a PP plugin to start up and use PP to display the slideshow. No such provisions are made for iframes.

I'm starting to figure out some of the wonkiness of what the previous coder did.

Instead of outputing the PowerPoint slideshow to the IFRAME, he had a second page in charge of displaying the PPT:

I rewrote this as:

<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" language="java" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="html" uri="http://struts.apache.org/tags-html-el" %>
<html>
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
    <meta content="PowerPoint.Slide" name="ProgId"/>
    <meta content="Microsoft PowerPoint 10" name="Generator"/>
 
    <link id="Main-File" rel="Main-File" href="<html:rewrite page="/displayCbt.do?cbtId=${param.cbtId}" /> "/>
    <link rel="Preview" href="preview.wmf"/>
 
    <script type="text/javascript">
        var SCREEN_MODE = "FullScreen";
 
        function load() {
            if (idx >= 0) str = str.substr(1);
            if (!str) str = "slide0005.htm";
            PPTSld.location.replace(MHTMLPrefix + escape(str));
        }
 
        function unload() {
            if (document.body.PPTSldFrameset != null)
                document.body.PPTSldFrameset.frames[1].document.body.resume();
        }
    </script>
</head>
 
<body>
 
<frameset rows="*" frameborder=0 on load="javascript:load();" on unload="javascript:unload();">
 <frame name="PPTSld">
</frameset>
</body>
</html>

The problem now seems to be related to the <link> tag. When I try to specify the /displayCbt.do?cbtId=XXX, nothing happens.

This may be starting to wander into Struts-specific territory, but can the HREF of a link contain a reference to a Struts action instead of .htm? (Note, the debugger showed that the Action was not accessed by this page).

Jason

Originally posted by Bear Bibeault:
I don't think you are going to be able to do that. If I am understanding your issue correctly, when you return the response to the main window, the browser (if configured as such) will use a PP plugin to start up and use PP to display the slideshow. No such provisions are made for iframes.

Originally posted by J. Ferguson:
This may be starting to wander into Struts-specific territory..

Struts will have no effect on client-side issues. Once Struts -- or any other JSP/servlet mechanisms -- has done its thing, the page sent tot he browser is just HTML.

can the HREF of a link contain a reference to a Struts action instead of .htm

Of course. The HREF can specify any valid URL that returns a response of the expected type.

I'm afraid that I'm not familiar enough with the use of Main-File <link> elements to be of much help.
[ February 26, 2008: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]