🎁Inline File & Media Viewer: Preview Attachments Without Leaving VisiLean

A single, structured view of each day's site activity that keeps teams informed and aligned

Every day, your team opens task panels, constraint records, and checklists, clicks on an attached drawing or photo and watches the browser download a file to the local machine. To actually see what was shared, you leave VisiLean, find the download, open it in a separate application, then navigate back. On a busy project with dozens of attachments reviewed daily, this download-open-return cycle adds up fast and pulls your attention out of the planning context where it belongs.

Why This Matters

On-site teams working from tablets with unreliable connectivity are hit hardest downloading large PDFs or progress videos just to check a detail is slow and often fails mid-transfer. Design coordinators comparing multiple drawings across constraints end up juggling browser tabs and desktop apps. Even office-based planners and project managers lose 5–15 minutes a day in unnecessary context-switching. When reviewing attachments is this cumbersome, files get skipped, updates get missed, and decisions get delayed.

What's New?

• Image lightbox with gallery - Click any image attachment (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, SVG, TIFF, BMP) and it opens in a full lightbox with zoom, pan, and left/right navigation across all images on that entity. A counter shows your position ("3 of 12").

• Inline PDF viewer - PDFs render with page navigation, page jump, zoom, rotate, and a built-in text search with hit highlighting. Scroll through pages or jump directly to a specific page number.

• Embedded video and audio players - MP4, WebM, and MOV files play in an embedded player with seek, volume, speed control (0.5x–2x), fullscreen, and picture-in-picture. Audio files (MP3, WAV, OGG) get a compact inline player.

• Office document preview - DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files render a best-effort preview directly in the viewer. Spreadsheets display the first sheet as a table; slide decks render as navigable slides. When full rendering isn't possible, a clean fallback with a download button appears never a broken screen.

• Plain text and code files - TXT, CSV, JSON, XML, and Markdown files render with line numbers and syntax highlighting. CSV files can also display as a formatted table.

• URL attachment cards - URL-type attachments show a rich link card with the page title, description, and thumbnail pulled from the link metadata. One click opens the URL in a new tab.

• File metadata at a glance - Every preview displays the file name, type, size, who uploaded it, when, and which entity it belongs to.

• Graceful fallback for every file type - Unsupported formats (e.g. .dwg, .rvt, .zip) land on a clear "Preview not available" screen with the file details and a prominent download button. No dead ends, no blank screens.

• Works everywhere attachments appear - The viewer is invoked identically from Tasks, Constraints, Checklists, Zones, Locations, table views, and any future entity that supports attachments.

How It Helps

A Site Engineer reviewing a constraint on-site taps the attached PDF drawing on a tablet and sees it render immediately zooms into the detail, searches for a spec reference, and confirms the issue without downloading anything or switching apps. The drawing stays in context alongside the constraint record.

A Design Coordinator opens a task with eight image attachments and swipes through them in the gallery, comparing as-built photos against the original design intent. File metadata confirms who uploaded each image and when, keeping the audit trail visible without opening a separate log.

A Project Manager preparing for a progress review clicks a video walkthrough attached to a milestone task. The video plays inline with speed controls, so they can skim it at 2x and flag the relevant section for discussion all without leaving the planning view or waiting for a full file download.

Key Considerations & Caution Points

Read-only viewer. The viewer is for previewing files annotation, markup, and editing are not part of this release.

Office document preview is best-effort. Complex formatting in DOCX, XLSX, or PPTX files may not render identically to the original. A download button is always available for full-fidelity viewing in the native application.

BIM and CAD files are not included. 3D model formats (IFC, RVT) and 2D CAD files (DWG, DXF) are scoped for a separate initiative and will show the "Preview not available" fallback with a download option.