There is an rather in-depth unofficial description of previewers and other things here
http://spaces.msn.com/members/WDSTech/
-Tom
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,
Program Manager
Windows Desktop Search
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
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
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
| 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. |
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!
