Get the UNC of a file that the end user selects

Question

I am trying to create a Sharepoint webpart for a user to browse to, and select, a file from a share on our file server. Then I need to create a link to this file to display in a list of links that will go onto our Sharepoint intranet page. I have created a custom web part using asp.net/c# in order to do this but I am stuck on how to get the UNC path to the document. From my understanding it wont work with an asp.net fileupload control or a html input element. What other options would there be? I really don't want the user to have to type in the whole path to the document. This needs to be a re-usable solution so that my users can create new lists of links to documents when they so desire. Thanks for any advice.

Answer 1

I don't think the full file path is supported or allowed via modern web browsers via the file upload control. What you would end up having to do is create something server-side that use a service account to access the file share, and then the client (web page) could call the server-side code as it traverses the file share until the user selects a file.

Example:

• server: on load, here are the contents of "\server\home"
• client: show the contents of subfolder "\server\home\pictures"
• server: connects to "\server\home\pictures" and returns contents
• client: selects "\server\home\pictures\foo.jpg"

Check out System.IO.Directory http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.directory(v=vs.100).aspx for ways to get listing of directory contents server-side (GetFiles, GetDirectories, GetFileSystemEntries, etc) and then you can return those results to the client.