Bypass content-based format detection so I can use a custom iFilter in Sharepoint 2013 Search

Question

Can I get SharePoint 2013 Search to bypass the content-based format detection and use the file extension to determine the format (and therefore the format handler so that I can use a customer iFilter)?
We have a proprietary file format which uses xml, and we use a specific filename extension to indicate the type of file.  We have a custom iFilter to parse the file, because we only want some of the content to be indexed.  The iFilter works with
Windows Search.  I’m now trying to use our custom iFilter to search the same files with SharePoint 2013.  SharePoint 2013 Search appears to determine a file’s format from its content and not from its file extension (I have confirmed this by changing
the extensions of .docx and .txt files).  SharePoint 2013 search appears to use the built-in XML format handler to index our proprietary files.  Can I get SharePoint 2013 Search to bypass the content-based format detection and use the file extension
to determine the format (and therefore the format handler)?  I think SharePoint 2010 may allow this, but I can’t find out if/how it is done in SharePoint 2013.
I understand that built-in format handlers can’t be replaced by custom iFilters, but I don’t want to replace the XML format handler for .xml files.  

Answer 1

Hi jeh271,
quite interesting, because as i know iPersistStream should be installed when you need to use ifilter when using windows search.
just curious, if you also restart the spsearchhostcontroller?
as i know the search should have the content-based format,we cant bypass it, if we bypass it, then it may broke.
i saw some thread about this before:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/944e6878-a7f0-4c0e-98b7-a7fb9faeef1b/bcs-connector-and-mimetypefield
ifilter example:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh694268(v=office.14).aspx
last time i did this, seems similar issue:
• The custom iFilter is working in SP 2010 but when we followed the same process of registering the iFilter in SP 2013, it was not working.
• So, we knew that we were some missing some extra step in registering the filter in SP 2013.
• Finally, we involved the Product group and we found out that we need to run an extra PowerShell commandlet apart from following the steps to register it in SP 2010 (given in this link:- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh694268(v=office.14).aspx )
• We ran the commandlet described here in this article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219556.aspx.
• The New-SPEnterpriseSearchFileFormat cmdlet adds a new file format and a corresponding file name extension to the search parsing system. This binds the file format to a filter-based format handler in the search parsing system. Thus, the search parsing system can only parse the new file format if the user has installed a corresponding filter-based format handler, an IFilter, for the new file format. If the installed IFilter registers more than one file name extension, the user must use the New-SPEnterpriseSearchFileFormat cmdlet to add a new file format to the parsing system for each of these file name extensions. The user must also ensure that the file name extension of the new file format is a member of the file-type inclusion list. The file-type inclusion list specifies which files that are crawled, based on their file name extensions. The system will only consider the new file format after a restart of the content processing components
• The example for our scenario would be something like this:-
New-SPEnterpriseSearchFileFormat -SearchApplication $ssa -FormatId dwg -FormatName DWGFiles -MimeType application/dwg
• Then, we restarted the SharePoint Search Host controller service on the machine where you have installed the iFilter and this resolved our issue and we were able to successfully search with .dwg files using the custom iFilter.
i am not quite sure if search treating your file as an XML file, if it is true, perhaps you can check this xmlmapper:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff795813(v=office.14).aspx
Regards,
Aries
Microsoft Online Community Support
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