ms search text ifilter

Question

I'm a newbie in MS Search so please forgive the dumb question :-)

I'm storing a large amount of specialized text files for a card game (bridge). These files are plain textfiles with a specific format to describe a bridge game played in a championship. The only difference with a regular .txt file is the file extension that is NOT ".txt" but ".lin"

What I need is implement a new iFilter that is an exact copy of the standard MS Search text iFilter, but with another file extension.

Is this possible by copy/pasting an existing filter and tweaking (tampering) its content? Or do I have to use c# to edit the iFilter and recompile?

Answer 1

The Windows 7 SDK has a sample IFilter implementation that would be a good blue print for what you are trying to do. It contains a project called "SmpFilt" The code shows parsing of a text file with a custom file extension. You will need to modify the code to parse your text instead and pull out any custom attributes from your .lin files.

Unfortunately, you can no longer build custom IFilters with managed code (C#/VB, etc). The sample project is in c++. Windows 7 and Server 2008 won't load IFilters written in managed code.

Good luck.