Utility to view Compound Files?

[Ramon]

The MSDN web page states the following:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Compound Files

Although you can implement your own structured storage objects and
interfaces, COM provides a standard implementation called Compound
Files. Using Compound Files saves you the work of coding your own
implementation of structured storage and confers several additional
benefits derived from adhering to a defined standard. These benefits
include the following:

* File-system and platform independence. Because COM's Compound
Files implementation runs on top of existing flat-file systems,
compound files stored in the FAT file system, NTFS file system, or
Macintosh file systems can be opened by applications using any one of
the other file systems.

* Searchable. Because the separate objects in a compound file are
saved in a standard format and can be accessed using standard COM
interfaces and APIs, any browser utility using these interfaces and
APIs can list the objects in the file, even though data within a given
object may be in a proprietary format.

* Access to certain internal data. Because the Compound Files
implementation provides standard ways of writing certain types of data
- summary information, for example - applications can read this
data using COM interfaces and APIs
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am looking for a "browser utility" like the one mentioned above
that will allow me to inspect the contents of a Compound File,
with all its storages and streams.

TIA,

-Ramon F Herrera

 

[Igor Tandetnik]

I am looking for a "browser utility" like the one mentioned above
that will allow me to inspect the contents of a Compound File,
with all its storages and streams.

VC6 comes with DocFile Viewer which does precisely that. For some
reasons, it is not included with later versions of Visual Studio.

See also

http://www.codeproject.com/macro/ssfview.asp
http://users.iafrica.com/d/da/dart/Delphi/DocFileUtils/DocFileViewer/df__DocFileViewer.html

I haven't used either of them myself.
--
With best wishes,
Igor Tandetnik

With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to
land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly
overhead. -- RFC 1925

 

[Stefan Poehn]

The MSDN web page states the following:

[...]
I am looking for a "browser utility" like the one mentioned above
that will allow me to inspect the contents of a Compound File,
with all its storages and streams.

Perhaps the docfile viewer (DFVIEW.EXE) is the tool you can use. It is
contained in Visual C++ 6, and most likely Visual Studio .net.