Appendix F: Customizing .lfe Shortcuts

An .lfe shortcut is a shortcut from Windows to a particular document or folder in Laserfiche. These .lfe shortcut files allow you to quickly jump to a specific part of your repository, or to send a link to a specific document or folder to someone else.

Users can create .lfe shortcuts directly from within Windows without needing to perform any manual customizations. However, in some cases, you may want to modify the .lfe file.  For example, you can alter a shortcut to point directly to a particular page of a document. When a user opens that .lfe shortcut, they will be taken to that specific page in the document.

An .lfe shortcut contains XML data telling the Laserfiche Windows client what to display. Although opening the file normally will launch the Laserfiche Windows client, you can also open it in a text or XML editor and make changes to that data. You can do this in Windows using the "Open With" command, or by changing the extension from .lfe to .txt. (If you change the extension, be sure to change it back when you are done making changes.

For example, an .lfe shortcut for the repository "MyRepository" that points to a folder with entry ID "100" would look like the example below:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='Unicode'?>

<laserfiche>

          <repository name='MyRepository'>

                     <entry id='100' />

          </repository>

</laserfiche>

You can manually change these values to point to a different repository or entry. For example, to point to the same repository, but to open the document with entry ID "85" instead of the folder with entry ID "100" you would modify the file to look like the example below:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='Unicode'?>
<laserfiche>
          <repository name='MyRepository'>
                     <entry id='85' />
          </repository>
</laserfiche>

Note that the syntax is exactly the same for both documents and folders.

You can alter the values for repository and entry ID. You can also add a page number to the entry ID block to specify a particular page number to open the document to. (Adding a page number to a folder will have no effect, as folders do not have pages.) For the purposes of the .lfe link, the page number you specify must be the target page number minus one. To link to page 10, you would specify page 9 in the .lfe file.

For instance, to open the document corresponding to entry ID "85" to page 15, you would modify the .lfe shortcut to look like the following:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='Unicode'?>

<laserfiche>

          <repository name='MyRepository'>

                     <entry id='85' page='14'/>

          </repository>

</laserfiche>