Continuing on my SharePoint experience I now moved onto creating custom searches. Our client was particularly interested in being able to search through his library of PDF documents. This meant we had to install the PDF IFilter for SharePoint. So the fun begins.
The latest version of the PDF IFilter (9) from Adobe is integrated as part of the Adobe Acrobat Reader 9. I found instructions on how to get Adobe’s IFilter 9 setup on Kamp’s Blog . Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work and I can only assume I missed something because of the number of steps involved (like adding the Reader directory to the path). Also it seems that there are two places in the registry you must update if you’re running MOSS.
As mentioned previously I’m under serious time constraints, so I just needed to get it working. After more searching I found Microsoft KB 927675 for setting up the older IFilter 6. It has nice and clean instructions on installing the IFilter and also a link to the Adobe IFilter 6 download site – which also mentiones that the newer version is integrated with Acrobat Reader.
I got it running first time out, with a bit of hindsight from the Kamp’s instructions. Here are some of my notes and observations:
- The GUID for IFilter 6 is {4C904448-74A9-11D0-AF6E-00C04FD8DC02} while IFilter 9’s is {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603} (from the Kamp’s site – as mentioned I did not get it to work)
- It seems you have to update more than one registry entry if you are running MOSS (the Microsoft KB only shows the standards WSS registry entries) for example:
- WSS index filter: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf
- MOSS index filter: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf
- NOTE I have NOT included all the affected registry entries here. Also note that the KB article does not mention these keys!
- The Microsoft KB does not include instructions on how to make the PDF icon show in SharePoint next to list items or search results. You can refer to the Kamp’s instructions on binding the icon for this.
- Being unsure of which services to stop and start I opened the Command window and issued the following commands (each time making sure the service has stopped before restarting it again):
- net stop spsearch
- net stop osearch
- net start spsearch
- net start osearch
- iisreset
- As mentioned previously this works for IFIlter 6 and after doing a full crawl (and waiting around 10 minutes after the crawl) I could search inside PDF documents – cool bananas! As I just needed to get it working I’m not too concerned with all the advanced and improvements made with the latest version IFilter 9.
Great now I can move on to integrate some SQL Server Reporting Services reports into my MOSS site…