# Searchable File Attachments
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [20 Settembre 2016, 3:16pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389 "2016-09-20T15:16:12Z")
**Posts on this page:** 14
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@VNVJeep](https://meta.discourse.org/u/VNVJeep)
#### Post date: [20 Settembre 2016, 3:16pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/1 "2016-09-20T15:16:12Z")
We have need to not only search the forums, but the attachments as well. Currently enjoying a 2 week preview of the product, liking it immensely, but just found out that search did not yield any results from any of the sample .pdf’s we uploaded. 😕
It would be incredibly nice if discourse could index and search .pdf formats, as well as other standard office-type or text formats.
Could you please add this to the upcoming feature list? Much appreciated!!
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [20 Settembre 2016, 11:35pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/2 "2016-09-20T23:35:35Z")
Whoa there, do you mean _attachment content?_ As in what the files _contain?_ I am not sure I view that as within the scope of Discourse.
Search should match filenames, if your filenames are unique enough, because the filenames are part of the post body. But the contents of the files are not considered part of the Discourse posts..
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [21 Settembre 2016, 5:45am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/3 "2016-09-21T05:45:02Z")
It is definitely something I would be supportive of in a plugin if someone feels like building it.
Would be nice to add this level of extensiblity to search.
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### Author:  [@VNVJeep](https://meta.discourse.org/u/VNVJeep)
#### Post date: [21 Settembre 2016, 7:48pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/4 "2016-09-21T19:48:26Z")
Correct… being able to search content within the attachments. To me, this is one of those features that is almost becoming a standard nowadays… and our users are beginning to expect this kind of functionality. We run multiple organization’s websites, and have been performing this kind of functionality for many years using the Microsoft Indexing Service. We have other sites that have switched to the Sitefinity CMS product, and this functionality was a must-have there as well. Gmail lets you do it as well across the the attachments you have saved in your account. It’s a tremendously valuable feature for those who provide and upload a lot of content within file attachments.
Anyways, please let me know if you reconsider, or if you do hear of a plugin that would be capable of doing something like this, I’m definitely interested!
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [21 Settembre 2016, 8:04pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/5 "2016-09-21T20:04:15Z")
It’d probably be a feature we only offer to enterprise hosted instances.
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### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [21 Settembre 2016, 8:10pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/6 "2016-09-21T20:10:22Z")
This gem seens a good candidate with a good compatibility across document types:
>
However running Java, adding a potentially very big column with search data and creating necessary plugin hooks on the search infrastructure is something, _involved_
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### Author:  [@VNVJeep](https://meta.discourse.org/u/VNVJeep)
#### Post date: [21 Settembre 2016, 8:25pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/7 "2016-09-21T20:25:51Z")
Yeah… we’re not that big. The Standard hosting model is even overkill for our sized group. ☹
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### Author:  [@Mittineague](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Mittineague)
#### Post date: [21 Settembre 2016, 8:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/8 "2016-09-21T20:26:41Z")
A bit different spec, but it might be easier and less resource intensive to have a page that queries uploads and lists the files, if that would be sufficient and be a fair compromise.
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### Author:  [@VNVJeep](https://meta.discourse.org/u/VNVJeep)
#### Post date: [21 Settembre 2016, 8:28pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/9 "2016-09-21T20:28:33Z")
Or perhaps, add another field in the upload file dialog box that asks for a description, and allows you to dump some content into there that would be searchable?
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### Author:  [@riking](https://meta.discourse.org/u/riking)
#### Post date: [22 Settembre 2016, 7:10am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/10 "2016-09-22T07:10:23Z")
With that kind of code, I’d be very concerned about bugs in the file format parsing. Office files are prone to making bugs when you try to parse them, including RCE on occasion.
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [14 Novembre 2016, 10:24pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/11 "2016-11-14T22:24:35Z")
Duplicate of
> [@Index File Contents for Search](https://meta.discourse.org/t/index-file-contents-for-search/31884):
>
> Right now, file names are indexed for search but the contents are not. It would be nice if the contents of files were also indexed, at least for the most common text-based files types, e.g. txt, pdf, doc, xls, csv, etc. Any plans for this?
?
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### Author:  [@newmember](https://meta.discourse.org/u/newmember)
#### Post date: [3 Maggio 2022, 4:38am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/12 "2022-05-03T04:38:37Z")
Penso che l’idea sarebbe quella di utilizzare qualcosa come [Apache Tika – Apache Tika](https://tika.apache.org/) e quindi rendere i metadati estratti ricercabili in Discourse.
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [3 Maggio 2022, 5:00am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/13 "2022-05-03T05:00:10Z")
Chiudo questo come duplicato di: [Index File Contents for Search](https://meta.discourse.org/t/index-file-contents-for-search/31884)
Molto a favore di qualcuno che sperimenta con un plugin, nessun piano concreto da parte nostra per integrarsi con un server tika, ecc.
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [3 Maggio 2022, 5:00am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searchable-file-attachments/50389/14 "2022-05-03T05:00:13Z")