AOS - _vti and root.war purpose

Question

Hello,

We're running a 5.2.g Community instance.

A lot of our users are using AOS for online editing with Microsoft Office products. It "works" most of the time but there's always some issues.

One thing that perplexed me is the fact that our instance doesn't have _vti.war, root.war and _vti_inf.html deployed.

How come AOS "works" without these ? Would deploying these change anything, considering AOS already works ?

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Have a nice day.

afaust · Accepted Answer

AOS only "works" partially without ROOT.war and _vti_bin.war. Their use case is to handle very specific Office -> SharePoint service call URLs and forward those requests to the alfresco.war. The whole Office integration is - from the Microsoft side of things - so messed up, that there are some URLs which Office always "assumes" to be supported on the server and for which Alfresco cannot tell Office to use alternatives. E.g. Office will perform an HTTP OPTIONS call to the root "/" URL to discover what version of SharePoint is present on the server (i.e. what version of SharePoint Alfresco fakes to be). If ROOT.war is not deployed, that call cannot succeed and Office may behave differently with regards to some of its HTTP calls to Alfresco. Similarly, there are a couple of calls to /_vti_bin/... URLs that Office uses to perform remote call operations, like translate / disect / map document URLs before making further calls, and again, if _vti_bin.war is not deployed, then Office may behave differently to what is intended.