Reading PDF and other software in Unity

Questions & Answers
1

Two part question. I have a client who wishes to incorporate company data into an interactive site. They want to be able to read data from their Microsoft database, or at least access it.

Is it possible with the Application.ExternalEval call to read data or bring up Microsoft software such as outlook?

The microsoft software uses a file ending .aspx

Second and easier... I'm trying to test this in stage in my environment. Have gotten the web browser to work. I'm still trying to get the pdf to read. Can anyone tell me what I might be doing wrong here? The pdf is in the same folder as my unity scene. I have also tried to give it an explicit file path.

Application.ExternalEval("window.open('Penelope.pdf')");

This is definitely an interesting area to combine Unity with other software, but I feel a bit perplexed dealing with Microsoft and reading data like this, could use some thoughts.

thanks

Daev

2

First of all, it makes a big difference whether you're using Unity to build Web players or standalones. And, whether you're using Unity Pro or just Unity. The reason is: Unity Pro supports plugins which basically makes anything possible. Those plugins are only available for standalones, though.

With such a plugin, you could certainly build a bridge to Outlook or the like (actually, I think there's even .NET APIs to control Outlook ... it maybe a bit tricky to integrate them into Unity and you may have to wait for Unity 3 because it updates Mono to a much more current version - but in general, this should work ... at least in standalones).

When your file ends in "aspx" it means that it's a ASP.NET Website. So for displaying that in Unity, you'd need some sort of HTML-Viewer. For that, you should probably have a look at this forum thread: htmlTexture plugin

I'm not sure if the Windows version of that ever got created ... but in any case it's a good starting point.

For your viewing a PDF in an external viewer, you could probably use.

Application.OpenURL("Penelope.pdf");

instead of using window.open(). You'll probably need the full path to the PDF. Applicatin.OpenURL in the scripting reference

3

The syntax for viewing a PDF or any file from the Windows local harddrive using the OpenURL method is:

Application.OpenURL("file:///c:/Penelope.PDF");