edit locally silently fails if nextcloud client is not installed

[rriemann]

I am running Nextcloud 25.0.0 RC3.

I have not the nextcloud client installed. Hence, no handlers for "nc://". When I click on "edit locally", just nothing happens.

I would expect either

a) to not see the button in the first place if the browser knows that the client is not installed
b) get a message that the client needs to be installed for this to work (difficult for corporate computers where people cannot install anything)
c) use a webdav handler instead. LibreOffice supports opening with webdav and there is already a plugin from @smehrbrodt https://github.com/allotropia/nextcloud_files_libreoffice_edit

In my public sector environment, LibreOffice is already installed on some workstations.

[Raudius]

Hi, thanks for reporting.

Unfortunately this is a hard problem to solve, because at the browser level we cannot know whether a handler is installed for the nc:// protocol. So we cannot know whether or not the Nextcloud Desktop application is installed (and running).

[rriemann]

@Raudius thanks for clarifying.

The term "edit locally" would describe opening with Nextcloud client and also opening with webdav (in Libreoffice). If the option would be renamed to "Open with Nextcloud Client" or "open locally with Nextcloud Client", users would understand that this requires the nextcloud client.

I agree that the term is long and clumsy. Maybe the admin on an instance level or users on a user level could configure the behaviour.

Other software like Zoom or MS Teams displays in the website after the click on the handler another text to offer users help.

[juliusknorr]

@Raudius As we talked about that during the conference, maybe we can add a overlay that is shown to indicate to the user that the desktop client is supposed to get triggered, with a hint to install it.

[joshtrichards]

This (messaging) was addressed in #3152 and follow-on PRs.

Also, can manually disabled outright via #3489.