Open Program On Client's Machine

[mperry]

This is for an Intranet project:
I am trying to have php open a CAD viewer program on the client's machine and open a specific file via a link on a database results page.

I can get it to work okay if the by linking to the file and if the viewer is installed directly on the machine it works. They way they have it working now is the program is on a shared drive on the network and all the machines are map to be able to run it without having it installed on each individual machine.

I have tried the exec function but I think this just runs it on the server side. I could be wrong since I am very new to this.

The path to the program is k:\view\cadview.exe

the path to the file is o:\pallet\drawings****.clf

I don't know if this is possible or if I explained it very well but any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[weekender]

sorry, it can't be done with php or any other web language.

firstly php is a server side language - so as you said, any exec would work on the server only.

secondly if a web page could run an application on the client computer, it could delete ., unmount the drive, restart the computer... so web pages cannot do stuff like this

[mperry]

Thats what I was thinking but I thought maybe someone smarter than me might have a solution. Thanks for the help.