I was wondering if anyone could help me figure out how to get pdfs held on an external hard drive to show up in a web viewer.

At present I have references held in container fields to the pdfs, and I have found a solution to showing the pdfs if they are held on my own computer, but it says:

"The requested URL is not found on this server"

when they are on the external drive.

I'm a newcomer to this, and have found references here and there to this being a problem, but have not understood whether this is a filepath problem or something far greater.

Ideally I'd love to find a solution that would enable people viewing the database on iwp to review the files as well, but if this is impossible I'd be happy with viewing it only at my own computer.

There is almost a terrabyte of files and growing, so putting them on the host computer is not an option.

If anyone can help me I would be incredibly grateful.

First, try opening the files from your browser.

In Safari, select open file, and browse to the file. When opened, it's URL will appear. This will confirm the volume is accessible and you can also inspect the URL in the browser's address bar.

File URLs start with file:/// -- on Windows, the drive name and path then follow.

e.g. file:///C:/Users/Owner/Documents/Tasks.txt

Several notes:

You ought to URL encode the filename, because otherwise, files with spaces or certain other characters may not load. Thus, you may want to use the GetAsURLEncoded function to URL encode them.

Depending on how filename is stored, on Mac you may need to precede name with file:///Volumes/volumename/path/filename.pdf

Thanks Fseipel.

I'd tried using the URL from Safari before, but it had not worked - probably because I was trying something overly complicated for me at the same time.

I've got it showing files on external volumes now - would this work for people viewing on iwp?

Or does a filepath from their point of view need to be entered?