How It Works

The work with document files in ONLYOFFICE Docs is quite a simple process but it requires some understanding of what is going on when you click your document link to open it in the browser, save the document or upload it from your computer to the document server.

In this section you will learn how to:

• Open a file
• Save a file
• Co-edit a file
• View the document history
• Work with action links
• Mention users
• Rename a file
• Review a file
• Work with inline editors
• Convert and download a file
• Protect a document
• Set a name to an anonymous user
• Comment on a document
• Compare documents
• Viewing
• Mobile integration
• Inserting external data
• Embedding forms into a web page
• Protecting ranges
• Setting avatars

User-document interaction

The user-document interaction is done both at the client side and at the server side.

Below the main notions used throughout the current documentation are explained.

The client side includes:

• Document manager - the list of the documents displayed in the user browser where the user can select the necessary document and perform some actions with it (depending on the provided rights, the user can open the document to view it or edit, share the document with other users).
• Document editor - the document viewing and editing interface with all the most known document editing features available, used as a medium between the user and the document editing service.

The server side includes:

• Document storage service - the server service which stores all the documents available to the users with the appropriate access rights. It provides the document IDs and links to these documents to the document manager which the user sees in the browser.
• Document editing service - the server service which allows to perform the document viewing and editing (in case the user has the appropriate rights to do that). The document editor interface is used to access all the document editing service features.
• Document command service - the server service which allows to perfom additional commands with document editing service.
• Document conversion service - the server service which allows to convert the document file into the appropriate Office Open XML format (docx for text documents, xlsx for spreadsheets and pptx for presentations) for their editing or downloading.
• Document builder service - the server service which allows to build a document easily without the need to actually run a document processing editor.

Please note, that ONLYOFFICE Docs includes the document editor, document editing service, document command service, document conversion service and document builder service. The document manager and document storage service are either included to ONLYOFFICE Workspace or must be implemented by the software integrators which use ONLYOFFICE Docs on their own server.

Shard key

Starting from version 8.1, the shardkey parameter is added to the URL QueryString when sending requests to the ONLYOFFICE Docs API, document command service, document conversion service, or document builder service. It is also added to the browser-server interaction during the collaborative editing as the WOPISrc query parameter.

The key field is used as a value. For example, ?shardkey=Khirz6zTPdfd7. If there is no key in the body, you do not have to send it (for example, in the getForgottenList command).

This is a recommendation when working with an editor server cluster to load balance requests during the collaborative editing: all users editing the same document are served by the same server.