User-Friendly Kind Names

  • Article

The property system contains a special property called System.Kind. This property provides a user-friendly name for the type of the item and is linked to its file extension. The Kind value must come from the following hierarchy.

Item

  • Folder
  • Program
  • Game
  • WebHistory
  • Feed
  • Document
  • Link
  • Movie
  • Music
  • RecordedTV
  • Video
  • Picture

Communications

  • Calendar
  • Contact
  • E-Mail
  • Task
  • Journal
  • Note
  • InstantMessage

Property handlers can declare their System.Kind property statically through the registry or they can provide the value dynamically through their code as they would with a standard property.

To statically define the Kind property, a REG_SZ value entry is added under the KindMap registry key as shown here.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

Software

Microsoft

Windows

CurrentVersion

Explorer

  • KindMap

Note that the Kind can be a single value or multiple values in a semi-colon delimited string. When providing multiple values, the most specific Kind value is listed first with the least specific following. In the example, Contact, being hierarchically more specific than Communications, is named first. The value Item is assumed and never should be explicity provided.