How do I open the Microsoft Office Web Viewer with a search term already applied?

Question

I want to be able to open an Excel sheet using Office Web Viewer, HTML viewing component. (This seems to also be called the "Office Web Apps Viewer".) The viewer component is a really excellent HTML office document rendering engine, but I can find absolutely no documentation online for it. It's even hard to discern what its correct name is. (Does anyone have details on the API?)

I need to be able to load the document and immediately call a JavaScript function to do a search so that the document opens with the search result already highlighted. Even better would be to be able to set the search term in the query string given to the viewer component.

Does anyone know if this is possible and if so, how?

Answer 1

I can say with quite some certainty that there is no such API as the viewer is not intended for such usage. Yeah, I know, not the answer you wished to hear, but then again, that's just the way it is. It's just a viewer, not a component to be used as part of applications.

The quick & dirty solution: Using an extension

One way to achieve what you want is to write an extension that would expose this functionality to you. Of course this would require your users to install this extension, but it is definitely an option and such an extension would be relatively simple to write.

The better solution: PDF.js

1. Convert your documents to PDF's using some server side solution.

   On Linux with OpenOffice.org this could for example look like oowriter -convert-to pdf:writer_pdf_Export doc_file.doc or swriter for LibreOffice.

2. Present them using Mozilla's cross browser PDF.js library.

3. Figure out the PDFFindController how to trigger the highlighting. Take a look at this demo and next at this source file. In there they are definitely triggering the highlighting (search for the object I named before), but as it is not directly addressing this question I am not going to figure that one out for you.