Mime Types in the windows registry

Question

In my windows service built with C# I am trying to set the mime types based on the file extensions as shown below

static string GetMimeType(string fileName)
        {
            string mimeType = "application/unknown";
            string ext = Path.GetExtension(fileName).ToLower();

            Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey regKey = Microsoft.Win32.Registry.ClassesRoot.OpenSubKey(ext);

            if (regKey != null && regKey.GetValue("Content Type") != null)
                mimeType = regKey.GetValue("Content Type").ToString();

            return mimeType;
        } 

On the production server we don't have Acrobat or word installed for obvious reasons. How do I get around with this? Is there any other way of setting the mime types? If not how do I create those mime types on the production server without having to install those softwares.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can simply create the registry entries for those types for your code to read

• in regedit go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes (the central part of HKCR)
• right click Classes, New Key - call it .pdf
• right click on the right hand side, New String - "Content Type", "application/pdf"

or you can find a machine that does have Acrobat installed and then use regedit to export the .pdf key to a registry script you can import on your server. You'll end up with lots of scripts: you can use notepad to edit them together but make sure you don't change the encoding when you save - it has to be Unicode!

You could equally add a list of mappings into your application but IIS won't serve static content when it doesn't have a content type so you should probably add them to your registry too in case you ever need to serve static PDFs.