Magento 2 - Link from a Libre/Open Office spreadsheet to a customer/order page in Backoffice

Question

I experience a strange behaviour

Some of my partner uses a spreadsheet in libre office and populate a cell with a hyperlink, like :

https://backoffice.mydomain.com/admin_xxxxx/sales/order/view/order_id/16423/

a click on this link, in libre office / open office / excel always leads to the backoffice home page, instead of directing to the right page.

Link is allright, copy/paste is ok.

things discovered since original post:

• After some apache log read, i noticed that the first http response is a 302.
• I also haven't mentionned that the /key/ from the url has been removed by using magento 2 backoffice option.
• This has been reproduced on two Magento 2 instance, on two different servers.

anyone having an idea ?

Answer 1

Answer after some research.

It appears that the first call (GET) to reach the target URL is done by the system or the application.

examples

a click on a link in a spreadsheet, on :

linux/libre office will generate an user agent like

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) KHTML/5.36.0 (like Gecko) Konqueror/5 KIO/5.36

windows/excel will generate

Microsoft Office Excel 2014

That will of course generate a 302 on apache side, because the calling agents are not loggedin, in backoffice of Magento 2.

In fact, following the example, theses are the ones loggedin :

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:70.0)

After the 302, magento redirect, but now the loggedin browser takes the hand (default system browser). And this leads to a redirect on the dashboard admin url.

This worked in M1, because session/identification for the backoffice used cookies or something accessible by every user agent on the local computer. M2 has changed this behaviour. So, this "error" seems to be normal at a magento 2 point of view.

Options can be following, but they are far away from the original question :

• Force the application to use a different user agent
• Recode a part authentification process for Magento 2 backoffice to allow that, probably introducing security troubles.