ckanext-officedocs

This plugin provides the option of using the Microsoft Office Web Viewer for previewing both MS Office and OpenOffice documents as an IResourceView

Supported formats

By default, this plugin will attempt to preview the following formats:

"DOC", "DOCX", "XLS", "XLSX", "XLSB", "PPT", "PPTX", "PPS", "PPSX", "ODT", "ODS", "ODP"

The supported formats can be configured in your CKAN configuration file:

ckanext.officedocs.supported_formats = DOC DOCX XLS XLSX XLSB PPT PPTX PPS PPSX ODT ODS ODP

Formats are separated by spaces and matched case-insensitively. For example, to add macro-enabled Microsoft Office formats:

ckanext.officedocs.supported_formats = DOC DOCX DOCM XLS XLSX XLSM XLSB PPT PPTX PPTM PPS PPSX PPSM ODT ODS ODP

Private package fallback

Microsoft's online viewer can only render resources that are publicly reachable, so by default the previewer is not offered for resources in private datasets.

You can opt in to a client-side fallback for private resources:

ckanext.officedocs.enable_private_fallback = true

When enabled, private Office resources show a fallback panel instead of the online viewer:

• On a Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera), the panel offers an "Open document" link and suggests installing an Office viewer extension (Office or Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides). With such an extension installed, opening the document renders it in the browser using the viewer's own session, which can reach the private resource.
• On other browsers (Firefox, Safari), the panel explains that previewing private files requires a Chromium-based browser with one of those extensions.

Note: browser extensions cannot be detected from a web page, so the fallback always shows the tip/link rather than auto-detecting whether an extension is present.

Viewer height

The height of the Office viewer iframe (used for public resources) is configurable:

ckanext.officedocs.iframe_height = 400px

Any valid CSS length is accepted (e.g. 600px, 75vh). Defaults to 400px.

Configuration reference

All options are declared via CKAN's config declaration, so you can inspect them with ckan config declaration officedocs and validate your config with ckan config validate.

Installation

To install ckanext-officedocs:

1. Clone this repository into the place where you normally install extensions, by default this will be /usr/lib/ckan/default/src/

2. Activate your CKAN virtual environment, for example:

   . /usr/lib/ckan/default/bin/activate
   

3. Install the ckanext-officedocs Python package into your virtual environment:

   cd ckanext-officedocs
   python setup.py install
   

4. Add officedocs_view to the ckan.plugins setting in your CKAN config file (by default the config file is located at /etc/ckan/default/production.ini).

5. If you wish for views to be created automatically for you, then you should add officedocs_view to the end of the ckan.views.default_views option in your config file.

   ckan.views.default_views = ... officedocs_view

6. Restart CKAN. For example if you've deployed CKAN with Apache on Ubuntu:

   sudo service apache2 reload
   

   or if you're using supervisor:

   sudo supervisorctl restart ckan-uwsgi:\*
   

FAQ

Q: It doesn't work, my documents aren't previewing

A: For the Microsoft online viewer to work, the documents to be previewed must be accessible to the wider internet (i.e. the Dataset Package is PUBLIC, not PRIVATE), and will only work if you use a hostname, and not just an IP address. To preview private resources, see the Private package fallback section above.