The core component of document viewing in PCC for SharePoint is the web tier. The web tier is composed of a web page, several web services, and a viewer. ViewDocument.aspx is a SharePoint Application page that displays a specified document using the PCC flash viewer. This page is used in all document viewing; it is used by the Previewer, Redirector, and custom integrations. The web services of the web tier support ViewDocument.aspx and the flash viewer. These web services are not intended to be called directly in any custom integrations.

Web Tier Public API

The web tier’s public API permits viewing documents. The public API consists of a single member, which is the ViewDocument.aspx page. For more information, see the section on Calling the API Directly.

PCC Flash Viewer

The PCC flash viewer is a document viewer built with Adobe Flash. This component of the web tier renders documents for viewing in the end user’s browser. In addition to viewing, the flash viewer permits document navigation, text searching, thumbnail views, saving, printing, text selection, annotations, among other things.

The flash viewer requires an SWF encoded rendition of a document. It requests this rendition by calling into the web services of the web tier. The flash viewer can render vector or raster content that is contained in the SWF encoded document.