IFilter Preview

What interface and registry settings do I use to supply the picture for the Preview box in the Windows Desktop Search window

I tried adding an IViewObject2 to my IFilter DLL but it never gets called.

Answer this question

IFilter Preview

FransM
What's the timeframe on the planned change
jagdishsingh

Hi Donald,

If you scroll up to Tom's reply of 12/09/05 you'll find his answer to your original question.

Thanks,

Bill Connors
CyberYodaCY
I don't have a time frame I can give you at the moment.
David Price

Don,

My apologies if my response wasn't what you were looking for. You asked a question and I thought it best to respond than not at all.

Bill
Chad Moran
We do not have an official way of doing previews at this time...as our preview architecture will be changing in the future.

There is an rather in-depth unofficial description of previewers and other things here
http://spaces.msn.com/members/WDSTech/

-Tom
IxxI
The answer to my question was not contained in the referenced blog.
Vb Fan
Any chance of getting my original question answered:

"What interface and registry settings do I use to supply the picture for the Preview box in the Windows Desktop Search window

I tried adding an IViewObject2 to my IFilter DLL but it never gets called."
Barry Meaker

Joe,

Thanks for answering, however a statement in a 3rd party blog hardly constitutes an answer. I have no way of knowing from whence Tom comes.

I have have opened an MSDN support incident through my Certified Partner account, so I suppose I will have to pay the answer, if it ever comes.

Making someone wait months for an answer could hardly be taken any other way than "blowing off your questions". Having the forum admin delete questions when he doesn't like how they are worded doesn't do much for having the forum taken seriously. Having the forum admin post "we'll get back to you" non-answers and then marking those non-answers as answers doesn't help either.

In the blog entry that you highlighted it says only 3 previewers are available, but that is obviously not true, since just clicking on various returned files results in far more than 3 viewers being available: .pdf, .doc, .ppt., .bmp, .jpeg, .wmf, etc.

To me, as a developer, it's inexplicable why a registered thumbnail viewer for a filetype would not be called.

If you want these forums to be useful, then questions need to actually be answered in a serious and timely way, with not "obviously incorrect" answers. Just take a look at the Vista developer forums for an example of a seemingly abandoned forum. Seems none of the "have to think about the answer" questions ever get answered.
Stoj
In process

JVE_WA

Let me ask this question another way then:

What interface and registry settings do I use to supply the picture for the Preview box in the Windows Desktop Search window The preview box is filled in with a thumbnail for .doc, .pdf, .bmp, etc. files, therefore it must be possible.

Bill, please forward this question to someone in your organization that is able to answer it.

khurramatk

Donald,

Sorry that you weren't able to find any specifics. As Tom said, the resource is unofficial. Unfortunately, at this time what you're looking for is not a supported feature.

Bill Connors
fjleon

Delder,

I am not on the Windows Desktop Search team...I work on the Visual Studio team that helps support our customer connections. These forums are one of our main "community channels". I think that you might just be missing some of the information that Tom was able to send your way. This is from the blog he mentioned above:

Preview Generation

So the items been mapped to a key within the registry but what do the values mean We’ll those values bind the previewer to a COM based plug-in that knows how to generate preview content for the item. The content generated by the plug-in can be essentially anything render-able by IE. We currently ship with 3 preview plug-ins and the COM interface they implement isn’t public so you can’t add any new ones. So why are we talking about customizing the previews then Because one of those plug-ins is pretty special…

If you were to look through all of the previewer keys you’d not two recurring patterns. The keys either contain a single default value, one of two GUID’s. Or they contain no default value but several named values. The keys with one of the two GUID’s map the items preview to either the Native (“{015CA7C6-DECD-40dc-AAAC-73EA9940E0F9}”) or Office (“{7A35A3A8-3DEA-40e5-B2AA-21DEF91A219A}”) Previewer plug-ins. Of those two the Native Previewer is the most interesting because it acts as a pass through for the items URL. When an item is bound to this preview we simply navigate our embedded WebBrowser to the URL of the item which is useful for items that IE already does a good job of rendering like PDFs. Even more interesting are the keys without a GUID because they get mapped to a special internal previewer called the Registry Based Previewer.

What's important here is that you can't add a preview plugin currently unless you can write a plugin that allows your file to be rendered in Internet Explorer. So, if you write a custom plugin for IE that allows your content to be rendered (like Adobe does with PDFs), you can use the information in this article to allow previews.

I hope this information helps, and please don't think that we are blowing off your questions. Tom is busy working on the next version of WDS, and this thread was actually elevated to me by another Microsoft employee that wanted to make sure you weren't getting neglected. Thanks for participating in the forums, and if you have any issues with the way that you feel like you've been treated here, feel free to email me directly at joemorel@microsoft.com.

Thanks!
mjones309

Bill,

Are you serious The fact that Word files, PDF files, etc appear in the preview box leads me to believe that it is indeed a 'supported' feature, just poorly documented.

Why even respond if you have no intention of providing any information.
RamaKrishna
Hi,

My name is Bill Connors – I’m a Program Manager who has just recently joined the Windows Desktop Search team to work on improving the Forum user experience. I will be facilitating getting an answer to your questions and comments.

My apologies for the unintentional delay in responding and many thanks for your patience.

Regards,

Bill Connors

Program Manager

Windows Desktop Search
IFilter Preview

Answer this question