[BLACKBOX] .odc file name extension conflict

From: [at]} <Josef>
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:43:05 +0100

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Hi Everybody!

I was hunting an e-mail problem with respect to attaching .odc files
(BlackBox documents) for some years(!) and found an explanation recently.
Since it traces down to a conflicting usage of the .odc file name extension,
it might be of general interest and I want to let you and OMS know the problem.

My problem originally occured when using a Novell Groupwise e-mail client
for sending an e-mail that contains a .odc file as an attachement.
(However, my feeling is that the problem may occur in other e-mail clients as well and
in general it is not confined to sending e-mail.)
The effect that I observed was that the e-mail client does a windows text file conversion
for the attached .odc file, ie. it converts single CR and single LF characters into
CRLF sequences, which obviously corrupts the .odc document.

When tracing the problem, I detected that the e-mail client does this conversion
due to a Windows registry entry named .odc in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.
This registry entry has an attribute named ContentType, which was set to text.
The reason why this .odc registry entry exists in this form is that Microsoft Office has been
installed on the computer. There are MS Office files called 'Office Data Connection' or
odc for short and therefore this file extension is registered.

After removing the .odc entry everything worked fine.
I am not sure how important the .odc entry is for MS Office but I would guess that
it is pretty safe to remove it or modify the ContentType.

In addition, the MS Office .odc entry has a subkey named PersistentHandler.
This is for including .odc files in the Windows Explorer Search command.
It is possible to include BlackBox documents in the search by specifying
the same PersistentHandler as for .txt. This treats the file as an ASCII file and
in many cases does a reasonable search in BlackBox documents. The precise way,
of course, would be to provide a COM PersistentHandler class specifically for
BlackBox documents.

May be OMS could think about this problem. I cannot suggest a general solution, but
a startup check for the ContentType would be cheap and help in many situations.

- Josef Templ

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Received on Fri Jan 18 2008 - 09:43:05 UTC