Excel files in Reason

[Melissa Dix]

Hello all,

We are having trouble getting Excel files to work with Reason. Any
thoughts, ideas or pointers?

We can upload them as an asset, link to them as an asset, but Reason
then appends a '.doc' extension to the file when we link to it.

Here's an example:

https://www.beloit.edu/humanresources/supervisors/downloadableforms/

Both the Excel files on this page are giving us this issue.

Thanks in advance,
Melissa

[Nathan White]

Hi Melissa -

For some reason, the unix "file" command is giving unexpected mime types for certain files.

For now, if you replace your _sanity_check_mime_type method in carl_util/basic/mime_types.php with the following, it should fix the problem (or do an svn update tomorrow), but I'm looking at a better long term solution than a list of cleanup rules...

/**
 * Fixes stupid results from file(1).
 *
 * On some systems, the file command can return some results that we really
 * don't want. For example, some assume that the presence of a C-style comment
 * start token (/*) means that the file is a C source or header file
 * (text/x-c). This is bad when it is given (for example) a CSS file that has
 * any comments in it.
 *
 * @param string $file_extension
 * @param string $mime_type
 * @return string a maybe-fixed MIME type
 * @access private
 */
function _sanity_check_mime_type($file_extension, $mime_type)
{
     if ($file_extension == 'css') {
                // We're just going to assume it's CSS.
               
                $m = array();
                return (preg_match('/;\s*charset=(\S+)/', $mime_type, $m))
                        ? "text/css; charset={$m[1]}"
                        : "text/css";
        }
        if ($file_extension == 'xls') {
              // We're just going to assume it's Excel.
                return "application/excel";
     }
        return $mime_type;
}

You will need to re-upload those excel files that you recently uploaded, because they have the wrong mime type in the entity. Alternatively, you could use phpMyAdmin or something to change the mime_type field for assets with the file_type .xls to application/excel. Excel files uploaded in the past (more than a couple weeks ago) should be fine, as the changes to mime type detection are relatively recent in the nightly builds.

Nate