Recently we had a question about whether or not it was possible to open a PDF file directly in a result popup, and the answer is - Yes.

In this particular case the user wanted to open a local PDF file in the popup, which is easy to do. But that also means that others would also need to have access to that local folder to see the PDF appear in the popup. In a corporate network this is easy enough to do by places these out on a shared network location. But another way to provide broad accessibility extermal to your organization is to publish them from your server and use a URL in the popup content. Let's take a look at how this is done.

Here we've used the Find Address task to create a result, in this case it's the location of ESRI's Redlands campus. Opening the result properties you'll see the popup content is currently the address we used.

Now let's change that to open a PDF file, in this case a PDF document on our C: drive. Just enter the complete path for the PDF, but remember that other users will not be able to view the PDF since it's in a local location.

Here we've improved our accessibility by pointing to a PDF published from a server, in this case it's a PDF document published on the esri.com Web site.

In all cases, this is what you'll see in Explorer

As you can see it's easy to do, and you can popup other types of documents, media, and URLs. We've covered some of these in a previous post.

Click here to view the result and open its properties to see how it's been done.

For more information view the Result Properties Help topic.