Sorry I can't answer any of your questions directly, being inexperienced in programming the things you're doing, but I do have a couple of questions of my own:
TerryBarnaby wrote:What I want to be able to do is open up an open office document
within the firefox browser window in view mode, but then if I press
the edit button open a new full editing window in openoffice.
When the user now saves it is sent to the webdav server.
May I assume you have control over the Firefox version and OOo version the users are running? Do they all run on the same OS, or does your web solution need to support a range of possible users? If I were thinking about ways to answer your question, I might want to know more environmental details and requirements than we have here.
TerryBarnaby wrote:1. The firefox plugin downloads the document to a file and instructs
openoffice to open that rather than open the link directly. This
stops the user from being able to easily save the file back to the web.
But it's in view mode, right? I can't see how the user
should be able to easily save back to the web at this point. Or am I misunderstanding what you intend and what you need here?
TerryBarnaby wrote:I have also tried using mozplugger to open openoffice in the browser window
in view mode with the "stream" option. This again semi works but has
the following problem:
1. If you open a URL in view mode and then click on the edit button then
an openoffice dialog pops up stating you cannot write to the file.
Yep, that's how it is in the forum... every question is a #1 question.
So what you're saying does not happen at this point is that the edit button should pull the file out of its current read-only security level on the server side, then launch a local OOo edit window with the document in edit mode.
My guess is you won't find many answers here in the Writer forum, which is basically for problems with using Writer. You might have better luck in the Macros and API forum (you can PM any moderator and ask to move it there) or, perhaps, you might also contact the authors of the Firefox plug-in, who know their work well enough to perhaps know what needs to be changed or what already exists to allow what you would like to do.
Good luck! Sounds like a very nice solution for users in a collaborative environment, if you can get it up and running, and I hope you'll be willing to post back here and share how you were able to accomplish it.