Mark Rae said:
It's not the web app per se - it's the browser. All modern browsers are
specifically designed to prevent *any* direct interaction with the user's
hardware other than for things like cookies etc. The fact that you're using
Windows authentication in an intranet environment is of no concern to the
browser, which is the same browser that you use to go out onto the public
Internet and do your on-line banking etc - the browser itself doesn't
understand the difference. All it knows how to do is send an HttpRequest to
a webserver and then process and display the HttpResponse which the
webserver streams back to it - makes no difference whether that webserver is
in your comms room or half-way round the world.
To give you a rather extreme example, imagine a web app which could stream
down an instruction to the client browser to run the equivalent of "format
c:" on the client machine...
Mapping a network drive involves direct interaction with the client machine
as far as the browser is concerned, so it's not permitted.
I kind of understand what you're saying, but I didn't think I was using the
browser itself as a means to perform the task -- I don't want the drive to be
mapped on the client computer that's actually going to the web app. I was
considering something like an admin page where the admin could enter certain
things like a network path, username, etc., and the app would use these
values in a VB script which could then perform the function (as if we weren't
using a web app to begin with), e.g. using something similar to VBScript's
MapNetworkDrive.
I apologize if you knew this already and I misunderstood your post.