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I am currently developing some functionality that implements some complex calculations. The calculations themselves are explained and defined in Word documents.

What I would like to do is create a hyperlink in each code file that references the assocciated Word document - just as you can in Word itself. Ideally this link would be placed in or near the XML comments for each class.

The files reside on a network share and there are no permissions to worry about.

So far I have the following but it always comes up with a file not found error.

file:///\\165.195.209.3\engdisk1\My Tool\Calculations\111-07 MyToolCalcOne.docx

I've worked out the problem is due to the spaces in the folder and filenames.

My Tool

111-07 MyToolCalcOne.docx

I tried replacing the spaces with %20, thus:

file:///\\165.195.209.3\engdisk1\My%20Tool\Calculations\111-07%20MyToolCalcOne.docx

but with no success.

So the question is; what can I use in place of the spaces?

Or, is there a better way?

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  • That does actually work on Visual Studio 2012. It says navigation cancelled but a new dialog pops up to open the document. You have to make sure Windows knows with what to open it. And it should be file:// and best use a mapped drive instead of IP Commented Aug 19, 2013 at 14:20

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One way that works beautifully is to write your own URL handler. It's absolutely trivial to do, but so very powerful and useful.

A registry key can be set to make the OS execute a program of your choice when the registered URL is launched, with the URL text being passed in as a command-line argument. It just takes a few trivial lines of code to will parse the URL in any way you see fit in order to locate and launch the documentation.

The advantages of this:

  • You can use a much more compact and readable form, e.g. mydocs://MyToolCalcOne.docx
  • A simplified format means no trouble trying to encode tricky file paths
  • Your program can search anywhere you like for the file, making the document storage totally portable and relocatable (e.g. you could move your docs into source control or onto a website and just tweak your URL handler to locate the files)
  • Your URL is unique, so you can differentiate files, web URLs, and documentation URLs
  • You can register many URLs, so can use different ones for specs, designs, API documentation, etc.
  • You have complete control over how the document is presented (does it launch Word, an Internet Explorer, or a custom viewer to display the docs, for example?)

I would advise against using spaces in filenames and URLs - spaces have never worked properly under Windows, and always cause problems (or require ugliness like %20) sooner or later. The easiest and cleanest solution is simply to remove the spaces or replace them with something like underscores, dashes or periods.

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Thats cool. But then all developers or readers of code need that registry entry.... not so cool any more :(

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