SharePoint PDF preview in search

Question

We have two web applications. One is still in 2010 mode and the other is 2013. One (2010) is an external facing web site and the other (2013) is internal.

Our prior SP admin had set search up to show PDFs in the preview pane in our 2013 web application. We had an issue with our OWA server where I had to disconnect/reconnect the OWA farm from SharePoint. When I did this it must have reset some thing because PDF previews stopped working in search. I checked the site collection and the search result type is there. I noticed that the binding (New-SPWOPIBinding) for pdfs to use the word app was missing, so I set it. The previews started working after a full crawl.

However, when I did this it also had the side effect of setting the 2010 web app to use the OWA word app to open PDFs, which wasn't the case before.

Anyone know how I can make it so PDFs can be previewed in search in one web app but not use OWA to open them in another web application? It seems to me the WOPI binding changes the whole farm.

I already looked at Wictor Wilen's site but that didn't help.

Answer 1

It turns out that the way to accomplish this is to set all the WOPI bindings except the "View" binding. If you have already been messing with the bindings, I would start by removing them all and adding them back:

Get-SPWOPIBinding –Application "WordPDF" | Remove-SPWOPIBinding -Confirm:$false

New-SPWOPIBinding -ServerName "your-server" -Application "WordPDF"

Now just remove the view binding:

Get-SPWOPIBinding -Application "WordPDF" -Action "View" | Remove-SPWOPIBinding

I did it a little differently as I removed all bindings then added back all but the view, but it is basically the same thing. These are the bindings you need:

New-SPWOPIBinding –ServerName "your-server" -Action "imagepreview" –Application "WordPDF"
New-SPWOPIBinding –ServerName "your-server" -Action "interactivepreview" –Application "WordPDF"
New-SPWOPIBinding –ServerName "your-server" -Action "embedview" –Application "WordPDF"

The results may not show up immediately. It appears to take a full crawl. However, in my case they started working the next morning so I suspect our incremental crawls help it along.

The "view" action binding is the one that forces PDFs to open in OWA instead of Adobe.