Context menu entries gone after installing tools

Hello! o)

I installed some PDF related tools today and now all my *.pdf context menu entries are gone.
I created these with DO of course and all were of type "Run a DOpus function".

This is *rrg. Do you have any idea why that could happen?
To my knowledge the DO specific context menus should not be affected by installing third party applications, hu? o/

Thank you!

PDF software is notorious for changing the PDF file type rather than augmenting it. So something has probably pointed .PDF to a completely new file type (file class, technically), while the old context menu items were added to a different file class.

If you look at the default value of HKCR.pdf it should tell you the class. Renaming the file with your PDF stuff under /dopusdata/FileTypes will probably get you the menus back.

In the registry, HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/.pdf gives you the file class for the filetype (e.g. on my system it's "AcroExch.Document.11"), and the context menus are associated with the file class. Whatever you installed must have changed the file class and so the original context menus have been "orphaned".

If they were Opus-only entries then you can probably get them back fairly easily by going to /dopusdata/FileTypes, finding the .oxr file for the previous file class, and renaming it to the new one.

[quote]If they were Opus-only entries then you can probably get them back fairly easily by going to /dopusdata/FileTypes, finding the .oxr file for the previous file class, and renaming it to the new one.[/quote]For PDF-XChange Editor the file name is PDFXEdit.PDF.oxr

Aha, cool! I already searched the registry and thought they were lost! Good to see they are not! o))

So do I understand correctly?
If the default application for a specific file type changes, the DO specific context menu entries for that filetype get non functional/dissapear?

Not necessarily, only if the file class in the registry changes.

I'm a bit surprised by this. In DO you setup the context menu entries for a file extension or mimetype (? never altered these though). So I wonder why the file class comes into play all of a sudden, I mean who is aware of a possible change to a fileclass when installing different software. I don't see why the context menu entries aren't tight to the extension only, so you don't risk to screw them up by accident. (?) Is there some advantage or need to handle it like that?

File classes can encompass more than one file extension. Or would you really like to have to configure the same context menu items separately for .jpg as well as .jpeg files? :slight_smile:

Of course not! o) I think I see, duplicating that handling for different extensions within DO is probably no good idea. Thanks for pointing that out.
Luckily, what happened here does not seem to happen that often, or maybe I just did not notice? We will never know, I did have weird situations for single context menu entries in the past though, not sure if this is related. Could be it seems? Anyway, thank you. o)