Purpose

Sometimes a user can experience problems indexing large MSExcel or MSPowerPoint documents and the reindexing may cause potential Unknown Ptg warning messages that are harmless. There is already a request to Suppress these warnings from the re-indexing of unreadable documents by the POI library.

The error is usually not serious yet can sometimes cause problems when large attachments are used. So you may want to disable indexing of a particular type of attachment type.

To do this, you can use one of the methods described below.

Solution

Method 1: Using the Administration Console

1. Go to Confluence Admin > Manage Add-ons.
2. Toward the middle of the screen is a pulldown menu that probably says User Installed. Change it to All Add-ons. 
3. Scroll down to Attachment Extractors under System Add-ons
   1. Expand Attachment Extractors
   2. Click the + sign next to "1 of 1 modules enabled"
   3. Hover over the PDF Content Extractor and a disable button will appear. 
   4. Click the disable button.
4. Scroll down to Office Connector plugin
   1. Expand Office Connector plugin
   2. Expand x out of x modules enabled
   3. Disable the following modules:
      1. Word Content Extractor
      2. Word XML Content Extractor
      3. Powerpoint 97 Content Extractor
      4. Powerpoint 2007 Content Extractor
      5. Excel 97 Content Extractor
      6. Excel 2007 Content Extractor

Method 2: Editing the atlassian-plugin.xml files of plugins

You need to modify the content of the atlassian-plugin.xml file in the following JAR files and comment out the relevant file type extractor:

• confluence-attachment-extractors-x.x.jar (for PDF) or
• OfficeConnector-x.x.jar (for Office files)

Both of these JAR files are located in the confluence\WEB-INF\atlassian-bundled-plugins directory.

If you are unfamiliar with modifying JAR files, please refer to the How to edit files in Confluence JAR files document for further information.

You can identify file type extractors in atlassian-plugin.xml files by the occurrence of ContentExtractor in their key attribute.

The example below shows a pdfContentExtractor disabled which would prevent PDF attachments from being indexed.

<atlassian-plugin key="com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.attachmentExtractors" name="Attachment Extractors">
    <plugin-info>
        <description>This plugin extracts searchable text from various attachment types.</description>
        <version>1.1</version>
        <vendor name="Atlassian Pty Ltd" url="http://www.atlassian.com/"/>
    </plugin-info>

    <!--
    <extractor name="PDF Content Extractor" key="pdfContentExtractor" class="com.atlassian.bonnie.search.extractor.PdfContentExtractor" priority="1100">
        <description>Indexes contents of PDF files</description>
    </extractor>
    -->

</atlassian-plugin>

The following table shows the file type extractors in the atlassian-plugin.xml of the OfficeConnector-x.x.jar file, which requires commenting out to prevent indexing:

<extractor name="Word Content Extractor" key="wordContentExtractor" class="com.atlassian.confluence.extra.officeconnector.index.word.WordTextExtractor" priority="1099">
    <description>Indexes contents of Word 97/2007 files</description>
</extractor>

<extractor name="PowerPoint 97 Content Extractor" key="ppt97ContentExtractor" class="com.atlassian.confluence.extra.officeconnector.index.powerpoint.PowerPointTextExtractor" priority="1099">
    <description>Indexes contents of PowerPoint 97 files</description>
</extractor>

<extractor name="PowerPoint 2007 Content Extractor" key="ppt2k7ContentExtractor" class="com.atlassian.confluence.extra.officeconnector.index.powerpoint.PowerPointXMLTextExtractor" priority="1099">
    <description>Indexes contents of PowerPoint 2007 files</description>
</extractor>

<extractor name="Excel 97 Content Extractor" key="excel97ContentExtractor" class="com.atlassian.confluence.extra.officeconnector.index.excel.ExcelTextExtractor" priority="1099">
    <description>Indexes contents of Excel 97 files</description>
</extractor>

<extractor name="Excel 2007 Content Extractor" key="excel2k7ContentExtractor" class="com.atlassian.confluence.extra.officeconnector.index.excel.ExcelXMLTextExtractor" priority="1099">
    <description>Indexes contents of Excel 2007 files</description>
</extractor>