I’m curious if anyone has managed to incorporate an ‘Open in Google Docs’ feature into their web app. I’ve seen how Gmail allows users to view email attachments seamlessly in Google Docs by just clicking a button, which opens it in a new tab.
Have any of you encountered this functionality in non-Google applications? I’m particularly interested in third-party web apps that have successfully implemented this feature.
If you’ve put something similar together, what strategies did you employ? Did you rely on Google’s API, or is there a more effective way to achieve this? I’m eager to learn about actual experiences from developers who’ve navigated this integration.
I’ve implemented this functionality in a document management system about two years ago. The key insight is that Google Docs can only directly open files that are already stored in Google Drive or compatible formats like Office documents. You cannot simply pass a random file URL to Google Docs and expect it to open seamlessly like Gmail does with attachments. What Gmail actually does behind the scenes is temporarily upload the attachment to Google’s servers first. For third-party apps, you’ll need to use the Google Drive API to upload the file to the user’s Drive, then redirect them to the Google Docs editor URL with the file ID. The process requires proper OAuth authentication and handling of various edge cases like file size limits and unsupported formats. Performance can be sluggish with larger files since you’re essentially doing a full upload before the user can edit.
yeah i’ve done this before but honestly it’s kinda tricky depending on what file types ur dealing with. google’s picker api works decent for letting users select docs from their drive, but if u want to open arbitrary files in docs editor that’s a different beast entirely.
I tackled this challenge last year for a client project and ran into several gotchas that weren’t immediately obvious. The Google Drive API route mentioned above is correct, but there’s actually a shortcut using the docs.google.com/document/create endpoint with specific parameters that can work for certain document types without the full upload process. However, this method has limitations with formatting preservation and only works reliably with plain text content. Another approach I experimented with was using Google’s URL scheme https://docs.google.com/document/d/{fileId}/edit after uploading via the API, but you need to handle permissions carefully since the file needs to be accessible to the authenticated user. The biggest pain point was managing the OAuth flow smoothly within the existing app authentication. One thing that helped was implementing a fallback mechanism that downloads the file locally if the Google integration fails, which happened more often than expected with corporate accounts that had restricted Drive access.