Forum Discussion
Edge: PDF files are opened with drawboard by default
hello everyone,
CTO of Drawboard here. Apologies for the confusion - I'd like to explain what has happened and provide a solution to this issue.
We have been exploring an integration with Onedrive / Sharepoint in the last few weeks, which is supposed to be strictly an opt-in integration.
Our development team pushed some changes to the 'Drawboard PDF' application in Microsoft Entra, around Tuesday (April 2) to add a 'file-handler' for PDF files, and it appears it had the following undesired results:
- exposing Drawboard PDF as a PDF handler,
- and also setting it as the default, without consent for all users in the organisation.
In fact, despite not being our intended behaviour, we're unsure how this was even possible. I apologise for this issue, and I would like to assure you that this was both unintended (as already stated) and of great concern to myself and our team.
We have pushed new changes to repeal this behaviour. The changes, take about 48-72 hours to propagate through. The first lot of changes to fix the issue were pushed on Friday (5 Apr), so we expect that you should receive this by Monday, if not, Tuesday (9 Apr).
From our investigation, this is the sequence of events that leads to this issue:
- A user from an organization using M365 needs to have logged into Drawboard PDF (web / windows / ios app) using their M365/Microsoft Work account at _some_ point of time in the past (at least once).
- The Microsoft AAD org needs to have settings that allows _regular_ (non-admin) users to provide consent to apps from all or verified publishers (Drawboard is a verified app publisher) to have certain non-admin permissions (like read / list files etc.)
- Drawboard pushed an update (around Apr 2, 2024) to our Microsoft app registration to add a 'Open With' file handler - which had the following unintentional effect:
- All users from the org (who are logged-in using their work MS accounts of the same org as the original user from step-1 will now have PDF files open in the Drawboard PDF web app
- Our idea was to only have this happen when users click on 'Open with Drawboard'
Drawboard has made changes (on Apr 5, 2024) to remove the file handler. This normally takes 48-72 hours to take affect and restore the previous behaviour in Onedrive/Sharepoint.
A quick way to fix this immediately is to use the following steps to clear the caches:
- On the affected machine, open OneDrive/Sharepoint in a browser and login
- Enter this URL, editing it per your organization, in the browser tab that OneDrive is open in: https://[YOUR SHAREPOINT DOMAIN HERE]/_api/v2.0/drive/apps?forceRefresh=1
- Clear your browser's cache and cookies
- Close, then reopen your browser - OneDrive links will now work as expected
For more info about file handler caches, please refer to the following article by Microsoft:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/developer/file-handlers/reset-cache?view=odsp-graph-online
Hope this resolves the issue for everyone.
Regards,
Krishna
CTO - Drawboard
http://www.drawborad.com
- Really appreciate the transparency. Our team has been chasing this down since Thursday or Friday.
Jimmy
Head of IT - Discovery Education - Putting in the forceRefresh URL (with my domain substitution) presents this:
{
"@odata.context": "https://XXX.sharepoint.com/_api/v2.0/$metadata#driveApps",
"value": [
{
"application": {
"id": "b28cb734-581c-4d4e-83d0-c880fe9b9b50",
"displayName": "SmartDraw Cloud OneDrive/SharePoint Integration"
},
"fileHandler": {
"actionMenuDisplayName": "SmartDraw",
"appIcon": {
"png1_5x": "https://app.smartdraw.com/Assets/Images/smartdraw-icon-30x30px.png",
"png1x": "https://app.smartdraw.com/Assets/Images/smartdraw-icon-20x20px.png",
"png2x": "https://app.smartdraw.com/Assets/Images/smartdraw-icon-40x40px.png",
"svg": "https://app.smartdraw.com/Assets/Images/smartdraw-icon-20x20px.svg"
},
"fileTypeDisplayName": "SmartDraw",
"fileTypeIcon": {
"png1_5x": "https://app.smartdraw.com/Assets/Images/smartdraw-icon-30x30px.png",
"png1x": "https://app.smartdraw.com/Assets/Images/smartdraw-icon-20x20px.png",
"png2x": "https://app.smartdraw.com/Assets/Images/smartdraw-icon-40x40px.png",
"svg": "https://app.smartdraw.com/Assets/Images/smartdraw-icon-20x20px.svg"
},
"fileTypeIconUrl": "https://app.smartdraw.com/Assets/Images/smartdraw-icon-20x20px.png",
"version": 2
},
"hidden": false,
"id": "8c5b9479-305e-4045-85ad-50c331d1771a"
},
{
"application": {
"id": "8604ee47-b4dd-43ad-8b85-0ce0d9c8a719",
"displayName": "AutoCAD"
},
"fileHandler": {
"actionMenuDisplayName": "Open in AutoCAD",
"appIcon": {
"png1_5x": "https://web.autocad.com/AutoCAD_logo.1.5x.png",
"png1x": "https://web.autocad.com/AutoCAD_logo.png",
"png2x": "https://web.autocad.com/AutoCAD_logo.2x.png",
"svg": "https://web.autocad.com/AutoCAD_logo.svg"
},
"fileTypeDisplayName": "AutoCAD File",
"version": 2
},
"hidden": false,
"id": "c0d7c475-395f-48f9-9fa9-f7ae07843b32"
}
]
}
Which appears to be the JSON definition of current fileHandlers deployed in OneDrive.
Its unclear if the "refresh" happened during the presentation of JSON, so I am sharing this out to you and then continuing the steps.
The presence of "smartdraw" makes me think this is the Drawboard PDF handlers you are discussing in your post. Are these the corrected handlers, or am I looking at the failed deployment XML that started back on April 2?
Pressing on...- Hi Sean,
SmartDraw (https://www.smartdraw.com/) is a different company to us. We are Drawboard (https://www.drawboard.com/).
It looks like you have the SmartDraw and AutoCAD file handlers installed too.
From the JSON, we can see that Drawboard file handler was removed from OneDrive server.
If Drawboard's file handler were present, you'd expect to see something like `"displayName": "Drawboard PDF"` in the file handler properties.
Regards
Krishna- after more than 4 days now it still doesn't work here. I can clear my cache and reset the whole config of edge and delete all temps. The first PDF opens normal. Going back and clicking it again fails. Now more and more users start to complain about drawboard coming up. We already deleted it from the enterprise Apps to be sure noone uses SSO for this.
