Home → How-To → Edit in your desktop XML editor
Ironmark's browser editor is optional. The Ironmark Desktop Launcher is a small Windows helper that round-trips a check-out through the XML editor an author already knows — Oxygen, Arbortext, VSCode, or any editor that reads an XML file path from the command line. Check-in, check-out, and audit still flow through the Ironmark server, so review, applicability, parts, publishing, and IETP delivery see the same document regardless of which editor produced the XML.
Sign in and open Preferences → Desktop Launcher. Click Download Windows Launcher. The download is a ZIP containing the launcher executable, a one-click install.bat, an uninstaller, and a README.
If your Ironmark administrator has disabled the download, the section will show a note explaining that; ask your admin to enable launcher_download_enabled in System Settings if the launcher is part of your program's workflow.
install.batDouble-click install.bat. It creates %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Ironmark\, copies the executable, and registers the ironmark:// URL scheme under your user account (no admin rights required).
Windows SmartScreen may warn about the unsigned publisher. Choose More info → Run anyway.
Double-click the launcher executable at %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Ironmark\ironmark-launcher.exe with no arguments, or run it from Command Prompt as ironmark-launcher.exe configure.
Choose Select editor and pick the editor executable — typically oxygen.exe, arbortext editor.exe, or code.cmd. The launcher offers to open a stub XML file to verify the editor path resolves correctly.
Pick any document you have permission to check out. In the checkout banner, click Open in Desktop Editor.
The browser mints a short-lived session token, embeds it in an ironmark:// URL, and hands off to the launcher. The launcher checks the document out, drops the XML into a temporary file under %APPDATA%\Ironmark\checkouts\, and opens that file in your configured editor.
Every save in the editor is watched by the launcher and flushed to the server as a working-copy update — the same behavior as saving in the web editor. Interim saves are visible only to you until check-in; other users still see the last released version.
When you close the editor, the launcher performs the final check-in and produces a new document version on the Ironmark server. The temp file is left in place so you can inspect the last-saved copy if anything went wrong.
Left a document open at the end of the day and want to keep editing tomorrow? Open the document in the web editor. If it is already checked out to you, the checkout banner shows a Continue in Desktop button in place of the fresh-checkout Open in Desktop Editor. Click it — the launcher hands off to your editor with your existing working-copy XML, no new checkout event is created, and check-in behaves the same as a fresh round-trip.
Two System Settings gate the launcher for the whole tenant:
launcher_download_enabled — when false, hides the download button in Preferences. Existing installs continue to work; only the in-app download is removed.launcher_auth_mode — browser_session (default) mints a short-lived JWT in the browser when the user clicks Open in Desktop Editor, embeds it in the ironmark:// URL, and the launcher uses it for that one round-trip. manual_pat disables browser-minted tokens; authors must paste a personal access token into the launcher configuration once and re-mint it when it expires. Choose manual_pat when program policy requires per-user API tokens rather than session-scoped tokens.ICN will not appear in the desktop editor's preview. Structured XML edits are safe; heavy graphic work should stay in the web editor where the graphic set is available.ironmark-launcher.exe manually when a new version drops. The Preferences → Desktop Launcher section shows the current server-side version and SHA-256 so you can tell if your installed copy is stale.