Thanks to Neal for this info. The page is now at http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/ZVMC and will be linked from the help page for wikimarkup

Cool - might be worth mentioning in your WIKI markup help somewhere since so many users do indeed use Firefox. Maybe add a note/link to the Links section:

[file://c:/temp/foo.txt]
[file://z:/file/on/network/share.txt]

This only works on Internet Explorer. Firefox users read this.
Creates a link to file on your computer or on a network share that you have mapped to a drive

And then document how to format links for Firefox and over-ride security settings in that link.

Thanks for pointing this out Neal.

With that setting turned off, the links in the wiki markup work in Firefox as well.

Cheers,
Nick

Neal,
Thanks a bunch for all of your help on this. I'll do some playing today and
see if I can get it to work. Given that we are a financial transactions
service provider and very much concerned with security, I may not be able to
turn off the restrictions in Firefox.

Cheers,

• Geoff

and this:
In general, a file path is converted to a URI by adding the scheme identifier file:, then three forward slashes (representing an empty authority or host segment), then the path with all backslashes converted to forward slashes.

Here's more info from:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Links_to_local_pages_don't_work
on how to set this for Firefox:
Type about:config into the Location bar and hit Enter. Find the entry for security.checkloaduri and change its value to false by double-clicking it. Then, restart your browser.

Oh yeah - I forgot an IMPORTANT setting required for Firefox:
links to documents are likely only going to function in I.E. (not Firefox) unless the Firefox security setting security.checkloaduri (http://www.mozilla.org/quality/networking/docs/netprefs.html) is changed to false.
Once that has been set, you will be able to access file links just like I.E.

Hi guys,
I would suprised if the links work in any firefox. They have deliberately disabled file linking to external sources. They consider this a security risk (as do most other browsers - except IE).

Let us know how you go with Neals suggestion.

Cheers,
Nick

Thanks Neal!! Appreciate your input and your other reasons for links is
spot-on.

Nal, I'll try out your suggested format. BTW, we use Firefox here.

As a suggestion: allowing your Attachments to be LINKS as well as UPLOADS
would be a nice enhancement. Most of our staff have made that suggestion to
me.

Cheers,

• Geoff

I use the HTML aware project description text to record File links to network drives for a similar purpose to your need to record links to documents within an issue. In my use case, I like to refer to project related folders and specs by links to shared network folders and/or files.
The syntax that works for me (on both I.E. and Firefox) is:

 <a href=" file://///file.doc" target="_blank">folder / filename</a> 

That should work on any version of JIRA, no need to use 3.4beta Wiki

And I can think of many reasons why a link is preferable to an attachment:
1) A living document may always have different versions and you want people to always link to the most current version
2) It is wasted space to duplicate a file that already exists on a network share, which is (again) considered the master
3) With no option to delete attachments, users will find it difficult to upload new versions.

By the way Nick, your help for Wiki markup says it only works on Internet explorer:

[file://c:/temp/foo.txt]
[file://z:/file/on/network/share.txt] 	
This only works on Internet Explorer 

I wonder if you add the 3 additional slashes whether it will also work on Firefox?