iFilters For Custom File Indexing beyond XEC Capabilities

[w0qj]

Re: iFilters For Custom File Indexing beyond XEC Capabilities

We need volunteers to discover how to implement iFilters into the X1 Enterprise Client (XEC) program, thus enabling XEC to index new file formats that XEC currently do not understand (or its Stellent Viewer cannot view properly).

This would not be easy--you would need a through understanding of file formats, and perhaps some programming experience to pull this off.

Once you make any iFilter discoveries, please feel free to share this with other users at our General Discussions Forums at:
http://forums.x1.com/viewforum.php?f=5


Other resources to help get you started on this enigmatic quest:

http://forums.x1.com/viewtopic.php?p=8485#8485

http://forums.x1.com/viewtopic.php?p=86 ... ight=#8634

http://forums.x1.com/viewtopic.php?p=8504#8504


Who knows, with the power of users sharing their findings with one another, perhaps we can find out how to kick-start this iFilter project together!


[Edit: I suspect iFilter was used to enable XEC indexing of Yahoo Instant Messenging in the new Yahoo Desktop Search version of XEC v5.6.1 Build 3408 which otherwise may be the very same program as vanilla XEC v5.6.1 Build 3408].
www.x1.com/yahoo

[w0qj]

iFilter had been implemented since XEC v5.6 as per Release Notes:

www.x1.com/support/release_notes_archive.html#3377

"X1® Enterprise Client v5.6
(Build 3377) (Released Tuesday, November 7, 2006)
...
* IFilter text extraction support.
o X1 detects installed IFilters on startup and utilizes them for text extraction by default.
o Stellent text extraction is used for file formats not supported by installed IFilters.
o The "Indexing Status" column indicates if the item was indexed with IFilter or Stellent.
o System Administrators may disable individual or all IFilter text extraction via Group Policy Objects.
o Implemented list of default file types that are not indexed with IFilter by defaults. List includes ZIP files.
o System Administrators may override default list of file types excluded from IFilter text extraction by enabling the Group Policy Objects policy.
..."


Summary: In short, you can custom add support for a new file format if the present Stellent Viewer does not support this. OpenOffice file format support, anyone?

[Kenward]

I can report that I recently installed an iFilter for audio files. It is called av_ifilter and comes from AimingTech.

http://www.aimingtech.com/av_ifilter/

It handles .asf, mp3, .wma, .wmv files.

"The current build 1.0.0.87 of Audio Video IFilter extracts the following files attributes: from the WMA and WMV files Audio Video IFilter retrieves Title, Author, Description, Copyright; from the MP3 files it retrieves Title, Author (Artist), Description (Comments), AlbumTitle, Year, Genre, Lyrics, Composer, Publisher. The IFilter treats all attributes as text contents. The Title, Author, Description, AlbumTitle properties are mapped to the well-known Indexing Service properties DocTitle, DocAuthor, DocComments, DocSubject correspondingly."

The indexing status shows in X1 as being "iFilter OK".

To get an idea of what it shows, here's a screen grab of X1:

[tjh]

@Kenward:
Talk about dragging up an old thread, but is this necessary anymore?

It seems my v6.2 X1 install already does this?