User defined column names

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Posts: 2
Joined: 13 Feb 2019 - 17:29
User defined column names

Hi Claudio,

first thank you for the great extension.

For our project we would like to display the user defined meta data values (which are added by our software to the pdf files) in the explorer. For example "UD_Direction", "UD_Route" or similar. First I wanted to write you an email, but than I thought, that this feature could be interesting for the other users. The user defined column names could be read e.g. from the ini file from the same directory as a dll during the registration process, or somehow added during the installation. Is it possible to implement this feature? I can provide the example of the pdf file with some user defined meta data values if you need.

Or may be it is possible for you to share the sourcecode. I would do the modifications myself...

Thank you

Dimitri

Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
Re: User defined column names

As far as I can understand you not only need to add customized parse for PDF metadata, but also show parsed data in a custom property column ("UD_Direction", "UD_Route") in Windows Explorer, right?

Well, that's a lot of work with a limited benefit, at least for PDFPropertyExtension "standard" users ;)
I agree that your users will benefit from that data being displayed in Explorer detail view, but I can't see a general needing for this feature.

I suggest you to have a look at MSDN documentation about Windows Property system.
https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/windows/desktop/properties/windows-prop...
https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/windows/desktop/properties/samples-reci...

It's not that hard to have a working simple custom provider using the provided samples.

This is the list of system properties, already available on clean Windows installation:
https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/windows/desktop/properties/props

Finally, this is a good start to implement the whole provider (taken from official MS samples):
https://github.com/mnkeddy/Windows-Classic-Samples/tree/master/Samples/W...

Posts: 2
Joined: 13 Feb 2019 - 17:29
Re: User defined column names

Thank you for the information. But this information is partial, because I also need to know how to read the meta data from the PDF files. May be you can give some hints where I can find information concerning reading meta information from the PDF files. Thank you in advance.

Dimitri

Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
Re: User defined column names

Well, that should be the easiest part; there's a lot of PDF parser libraries available, with different licensing.

The worst part is that you need to be quick in file parsing, otherwise Explorer hangs and becomes somehow unresponsible.
PDFPropertyExtension has its own internal parsing library; I wrote it by myself because I needed something lightweight and blazing fast and I was not ready to make the whole sources public by using a GPL'd library.
...and I'm still not ready for it, sorry ;)