I currently have a problem. My users have files they are uploading that must maintain the eight dot three naming convention. But They also need to version control the files. Unfortunatly, someone decided it was a good idea to add a number as part of the extention. (Example: testfile.001) Using letters and numbers they have over 13,000 combinations. When they try to down load these filed from the web the browser (Explorer or Netscape) appends a .txt extention to it. Does anyone know of a change in the registry or somewhere else to stop windows from doing this by default?
It is relitivly simple. We have an program used by are calibrators that creates UNIX based text files. These files must be saved in the old eight dot three naming convention to support some older programs. Inorder to institute version controls on the file the users decided to number the files by replacing the dot three extiontion with a number based file from .000 to .zzz. This caused many isssues for other programs expecially windows because it didn't have a definable extention. This didn't become a true problem until we began placing the files into our new Orical HTTP based repository.
When a user tries to download these files from the system he ran in to two problems. First he couldn't click on it to down load because it opened it automatically in the browser. This was solved by educating the user to right click the link and choose "Save Link As".
Second the users noticed that when the file was downloaded, windows added a .txt extention to the file name. The users can get around this by adding quotes around the file name before download or renaming the file after transfer. I am looking for a solution that can tell microsoft to stop putting .txt extiontions on unknown files by default. The only solution I can see is a registry hack of some form.
First off, unless there are some other restrictions on filenames, your naming conventions have far more than just 13,000 possible permutations.
Assuming that all eight characters must be filled, and limiting ourselves to only alphabetic characters for the initial filename, with up to 1000 possible extensions per filename, (000 - 999), I calculated close to 209 trillion possible filenames (give or take a billion).
26^8 * 10^3 = 29 trillion....
Limiting yourself to a five character acronym, followed by the numeric value, with an ordinary .txt extension, will still give you far more variations than you could ever use in a lifetime.
Further, .txt files are a recognized MIME type, and IE will try to open the file in your browser. Downloading it as a .zip file will invoke the 'Download or Open?" dialog box, which would be the alternative to right-clicking and choosing to save the target file.
Or, rename the txt extension to one that is not recognized, and the dialog box displays when downloading that file as well.
There are some other methods that may work, including one that involves redefining the MIME behavior in the META tags, but I have not had a lot of success with that.
That technique would be worth posting if anyone has has done it successfully. . .
You are correct. I did mess up on the calculations. There is a possible of 46656 possible dot three extentions. (Not counting the eight charictor file name and the possibility for upper and lower case.) Because of this problem the conventional mime type changes don't apply unless I am willing to create 46656 mime type settings. It would be nice if Windows wouldn't mess with files it doesn't recognize.
I am completely lost by this question, but I am wondering if it could be something to do with the web server configuration
In IIS (popular Windows web server software) I think there are options to set up MIME types for different file extensions,
I have no idea how this works on UNIX, Apache, etc. but I would presume there might be something similar ??? Did you try asking atwww.geekvillage.com/forums/there are some folks at that board who know a lot of this kind of tech stuff
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