Hi,

We have a document management software that we use to maintain office documents and to version them. It's a web based application and allows creating deep-links (direct URL to a physical document) so that we can directly refer/download a physical document managed by this application.

Basically there is a Servelt that needs the document-id to be passed and then based on that document-id it fetches the physical document and allows the user to open/save it.

This application also manages Ms Word documents.

As I have mentioned before we can directly access a physical document using a URL which we call SmartLink.

When we create a hiperlink in an Ms Word document with a SmartLink that points to another Ms Word document (.doc/.docx) and then if we click on that link to open the physical document, it takes too long (25-30 Secs) to download and open the document. Moreover while opening the docuemnt Ms Office shows few warning messages as well. Whereas if we directly past the smartlink in a browser and press Enter then it opens almost without any delay.

This issue happens only if the pointed physical document is a Word document. All other documents open fast.

We face this issue only when the Ms Word document containing the hyperlink is opened using Ms Office 2010 in Windows 7 systems. If we open the same document in Ms Office 2003 in Windows XP machines then we do not see any delays. We do not have any machines with Ms Office 2007, so I can't say anything about that.

Few Facts:

The SmartLink URL is a http get request.

The application sends the physical document as an attachment to the http response.  ("Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename="...)

We are noticing multiple http calls when the call is made from an Ms Office 2010 document. (user-agent : Microsoft Office Existence Discovery). I am not sure if that is the reason. We get four server hits for one request only. Two "Get" Http request and Two "Head" Http requests.

Whereas when the call is made from an Ms Office 2003/any browse window then we see only one "Get" http request.

Please let me know how to get rid of this excessive delay. The only concern over here is the delay in opening the documents.

Thanks

Anup