Problems opening a PDF in Acro Reader 8 with BuddyAPI?

Question

I apologize in advance for not having enough information to
properly diagnosis this situation, I’m encountering
considerable resistance from others in my company to go back to the
client and ask for additional details, but here’s the
situation:
We’ve got a project out in the field that opens PDF
files using BuddyAPI (code below) … it worked fine when the
client machines were all using Acro Reader 7.x Some time during the
year the client’s IT department upgraded everyone to Acro
Reader 8.x, now it works on some machines and not on others. I
don’t know how many machines it doesn’t work on, at
least one, probably two (vs 4000 copies of the project out in the
field). What do I mean by “doesn’t work”
…well, I’m not really sure … when I ask if the
client can open the PDFs directly, outside of our app, I get an
answer similar to “yeah, they must have tried that …
just post the question on the forum” … I also
don’t know if an error is generated, I’m told simply
the PDFs don’t open, although if an error were generated I
would think someone would mention it. Sorry to vent, I know
it’s not much to work with, but if someone else has a similar
problem I’d love to know about it.
BTW: I’ve got 3 machines here in the office all with
Acro Reader 8, works fine on all of them.

Answer 1

Hi all,
I just posted this in anotehr thread dealing with the same
issue.
I have emailed Gary who develops the Buddy API Xtra and he
did some
testing and this is what he reported.
It seems that when Adobe install Reader 8.0, they don't
implement an
'Open' association, but a 'Read' one. If you right click on a
.pdf file
you will see that the actions available don't include Open.
Now, this
should only affect people using an older version of Buddy,
that was
something changed for Acrobat 7 and .fdf files, so that if
there wasn't
a Open action, it used the default one instead. So the best
option is to
use the current version of Buddy. But to make it work with
programs
still older buddy that can't be changed, it should be
possible to write
a .reg script or updater to add the Open command to the list
of actions,
then older version of buddy will work. You can use this
script in a
projector to update the registry so that pdf files will open.
So that
could be used in a updater projector.
on setAcroOpenReg
str = baReadRegString(
"Applications\AcroRD32.exe\shell\Read\command",
"", "", "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT" )
if length( str ) > 0 then
baWriteRegString(
"Applications\AcroRD32.exe\shell\Open\command",
"", str, "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT" )
end if
end
Hope that helps.
regards
Dean
Director Lecturer / Consultant / Director Enthusiast
http://www.fbe.unsw.edu.au/learning/director
http://www.multimediacreative.com.au
email: [email protected]