I am currently working on finding a way to verify if an iFilter is installed/activated on a SharePoint site. I have a little app that will check to see if Adobe PDF iFilter 9 or 10 is installed on the box (via registry lookup) but I am wondering if there is a way to check against SharePoint itself?
The reason being that I want to be able to check for other 3rd party iFilters as well, and it is not practical to do a lot of hardcode-values.
I haven’t had much luck in searches yet, but if anyone knows a way to check SharePoint through service applications or some other way, I would be very grateful!
EDIT: I am currently looking into ContentSource and SharePointContentSource to see if I can grab any object out of there that would be useful to what I am trying to do.
The search engine itself doesn’t understand format of a document. Therefore, it looks in windows registry for an appropriate IFilter and finds it. IFilter understands the document format and extracts text from the document back to the search engine.
There is this app that looks in the registry for other 3rd party iFilters: http://blog.nirsoft.net/2010/02/13/view-the-list-of-installed-ifilter-components-of-windows-search/
I am not aware of any way to find the list of iFilters in SharePoint itself.