“Open in app” for all file types

For a long time only office documents could be opened in desktop application directly from MetaShare. Currently it is possible to open all other file types using “Open in app” OneDrive feature.

How does it work?

  1. MetaShare user clicks “Open in app” action or clicks the filename (if “Open in app” was previously set as default for opening this file type).
  2. MetaShare opens the file using OneDrive link.
    • At this point user may see a dialog informing that MetaShare tries to open OneDrive, and not the application that will be used to edit the file.
    • After that OneDrive may display another question:

  3. OneDrive saves the selected file in a local temporary folder located under C:\Users\<Username>\OneDriveCloudTemp
  4. OneDrive opens the file with default application or asks which application to use.
  5. User saves the changes to the local copy of the file in OneDrive temporary folder.
  6. OneDrive synchronizes changes back to SharePoint.

Important note

Some applications will not let the user simply save the changes to the currently open file, but will ask to choose location where to save them. It is important to save the file in it’s current location for the changes to be synchronized. For example Adobe Acrobat will show following dialog, where the user should select the most recent folder, the OneDrive temporary folder under C:\Users\<Username>\OneDriveCloudTemp

Requirements

  1. This feature is available for MetaShare Online (SharePoint Sever does not support “Open in app” yet).
  2. It will work on Windows and macOS devices that have the OneDrive sync client installed.
  3. SharePoint sites and libraries need to have Offline Client Availability enabled.
    • In Site settings:
    • In Library settings, under Advanced settings:

Issues you may encounter:

  1. It does not seem possible to use more than one work account on one Windows profile. When a user tries to open a file with an account from another tenant OneDrive will try to configure sync for that tenant, but “open in app” will show error message instead of opening the file.
  2. Sometimes sync stops working and when a user clicks “open in app” their OneDrive folder will open instead of the file.

Possible solutions:

Reset OneDrive

When experiencing persistent issues with OneDrive on Windows it is possible to reset OneDrive client using following steps:

  1. Press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog.
  2. Type %localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\onedrive.exe /reset and press Enter.
  3. After a couple of minutes, if OneDrive does not start automatically, type %localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\onedrive.exe and press Enter.

Reinstall OneDrive:

If resetting does not work, the user may need to reinstall OneDrive. Ensure that they download the latest version from the official Microsoft website.