Using Google Docs Viewer to preview documents online

Google Docs Viewer can be used to preview uploaded Word, Excel and PDF files directly in the browser. Instead of downloading a document first, a user can click a link in the PHPRunner application and open the file in the viewer.

The basic viewer URL is:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=<url of your document>

The important part is that Google must be able to reach the document URL. A file that is available only on a local network, behind authentication, or through a temporary session URL may not be accessible to the viewer.

In PHPRunner, the setup depends on whether the field uses the Basic upload control or the Advanced upload control. In both cases, set the uploaded field to View as: Custom and build the viewer link from the stored file name.

Basic upload control:

$value = "<a target="_blank" href='https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https://yourwebsite.com/project/files/".$value."' rel="noopener">".$value."</a>";

Replace https://yourwebsite.com/project/files/ with the public URL of the folder where your uploaded files are stored.

Advanced upload control:

$fileArray = my_json_decode($value);
$value="";

for($i = 0; $i < count($fileArray); $i++)
{
	$value .= "<a target="_blank" href='https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https://yourwebsite.com/project/".$fileArray[$i]["name"]."' rel="noopener">".
		$fileArray[$i]["usrName"]."</a> ";
}

Replace https://yourwebsite.com/project/ with the public URL of your web application.

Troubleshooting:
If the viewer does not open the document, first paste the document URL itself into a private/incognito browser window. If the file cannot be opened there without logging in, Google Docs Viewer will not be able to retrieve it either.

Also make sure the final document URL is a complete public URL beginning with https:// and does not point to a local file-system path.