You could somewhat leverage a workflow I made to force stuff to open in Office Online.  . Basically, the workflow goes and grabs the attachments, then writes the URLs of them to hyperlink fields. The hyperlink fields show on display, and the attachment control shows on new and edit. You could just have the attachment control show and be active on new and then have the hyperlink fields show on edit and display. And, if you didn't need to force open in Office Online, you could even nix the part where I modify the URLs to add ?web=1 at the end and save yourself a bit of trouble!

Thank you Courtney,

I was actually studying that link and also .

I will try and let you know if this works!

Hi Courtney,

Working!! but one problem...when Approver tries to edit the form (to execute his task), the hyperlink field is back messy.

Assuming Approver was able to view PDF in Display mode already, I could simply hide the messy hyperlink in Edit mode as well, but then Edit mode will lose a reference to the attachment.

I understand that this is nature of hyperlink field in Edit mode, but any way to keep the display-mode format of hyperlink in Edit mode too?

Thank you!

-Naoko

Hey Naoko! I didn't even think of that. Here's what you can do though. In your control settings hyperlink fields, you can force them to always behave in "Display," never edit.

Here's what my form looks like when I do that:

Note, the Link to Attachments are the hyperlink fields. I changed the rule on my form to show those on edit and new (so I could show you this). I accomplished this by, in the designer, opening the control settings for each hyperlink field and changing the "Control Mode" from "Auto" to "Display."

Hey ‌, were you able to resolve your question with some of these tips? If so, please mark one as correct to help others in the community!

Hi,

This post is a little old but i have the same issue right now and the solution that i've built it's very simple and i hope this help someone that come here with the same problem.

One simple way to fix this is adpatating the rule that disable the attachments control to be disabled only on edit mode, that way opening the view form mode our links will be clicable.

Hello,

I can't believe I haven't noticed this problem before. It should be possible to disable adding and deleting attachments without losing the ability to view them.

For me, a better and simpler workaround was to use jQuery to remove the disabled attribute of the attachment link.

This targets the attachment table, then the cell with the attachment link (otherwise you enable deletion as well), then the link itself. 

I've only tested it on an SP2013 classic form, via Chrome, but it should work in other circumstances.

I'm actually using the following code so it also opens attachments in a new window.

Hope someone finds this useful!