Lotus Notes prefixes weblinks with file: scheme

Question

I have Lotus Notes 9.0.1 running on Xubuntu 15.10 and I can't find a way to open links by just clicking on them.

The default application for links is set to google chrome and it works from within other apps but not from Notes. I always get a popup complaining about a link that can't be opened.

This popup seems to be from Thunar and it complains that it can't open urls like this:

/home/username/http:/hostname/path/site.html

When I hover over the link, I see that there is no "/home/username" in the link, so somehow Notes must add it after clicking on it.

I also tried to set the default file manager to be Chrome and the link that Chrome tries to open is

file:///home/username/http:/hostname/path/site.html

So again: Notes seems to add "file:///home/username/" to each link I try to open.

When I define that Notes should use the internal browser it works, but it is not my desired behavior.

Any clues how I can change this prefixing behavior of Notes?

Answer 1

If you've typed this accurately, it looks to me like the links are mal-formed. I.e., you're showing "http:/hostname/path/site.html", but there should be a double slash after "http:", and you've only got one. The client is noticing that there is not a valid prefix ending in "//", so it assumes it is a file link and is adding a valid prefix - plus it thinks it is a relative path since there is no leading "/" before "http", so it adds the user's home directory as specifice in the environment.

What application is generating those links?

Answer 2

I've seen this issue in Xubuntu 14.04, and kind of solved it by renaming exo-open (in /usr/bin) to real_exo-open, and by creating a shell-script to replace exo-open, and figure out what to do.

This is a bad solution, because you have to re-do this every time you upgrade your system.

Here's my script:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Called as: $0 $@" >> /tmp/exo-open.log
startswith() {
        [ "${1#$2}" == "$1" ] && return 1;
        return 0;
}

launched=0;
[ "$1" = "--launch" ] && [ "$2" == "FileManager" ] && {
        arg1=$3;
        bad=${HOME}/;
        startswith $3 ${bad}http && {
                shift;
                shift;
                shift;
                echo "real_exo-open --launch WebBrowser ${arg1#$bad} $@" >> /tmp/exo-open.log;
                launched=1;
                real_exo-open --launch WebBrowser ${arg1#$bad} "$@";
        }
}
[ $launched -eq 0 ] && {
        echo "real_exo-open $@" >> /tmp/exo-open.log;
        real_exo-open "$@";
}

So basically, if you choose to use this ugly hack, here's what you do:

1. cd /usr/bin
2. sudo mv exo-open real_exo-open
3. cat > /tmp/exo-open
4. Copy and paste the above script, and end with CTRL-D.
5. sudo mv /tmp/exo-open
6. sudo chown root.root exo-open
7. sudo chmod +x exo-open

And that's it.