Hello,
I have a conceptual question about SharePoint's document property and metadata handling. The company I work for uses SharePoint for document management. For this purpose our IT department has defined lots of custom managed metadata that is used by the (Word) documents in the different libraries and by the review and approval workflows.
Now the interesting part: We are currently developing a custom authoring tool that creates a specific type of document that should later be routed through the SharePoint review and approval workflows. To be able to do so, these types of files need to have the same type of metadata and document properties as their Word DOCX counterparts.
Currently, the files that are created by our custom application are plain XML files that adhere to a custom schema. We are thinking about packaging those files using OPC (open packaging conventions), following the Office Open XML (OOXML) standard, which essentially means that our current custom XML content would become the "document.xml" part of an OOXML document package, and the Dublin Core document properties and the custom XML metadata would be stored inside the "docProps" and "customXml" structures.
I have already experimented a lot with hand-crafted and ZIP-packaged OOXML files in our SharePoint sandbox. I managed to modify the values of SharePoint managed metadata for a document in a library by manually editing the XML inside a packaged file, at least as long as I use a standard MS Office file extension (i.e. DOCX, XLSX, PPTX). When I change the file extension of such a file to e.g. "PRLX", SharePoint no longer extracts any metadata/properties from that file. However, our custom files need to have a unique file extension.
Where seems to be the proper screw in SharePoint to activate the metadata/property extraction from files with custom file extensions? I hope there is such a screw somewhere.
Thanks a lot for your help, and forgive me if I used incorrect terminology here and there; I am not a SharePoint developer and I am still familiarizing with the domain...
Marcus