Manual:External editors/Control files

Control files are in Microsoft's .ini format: [Section] Key=Value. This makes them very easy to read.

One very important principle behind the protocol is that control files sent to the helper application are thin. The helper application handles the downloading and uploading. That makes it relatively easy to add support for application/x-external-editor to any wiki engine, since only few changes have to be made.

Note, comments are denoted by a semi-colon at the beginning of a line.

Control file
[Process] Type=[1] Engine=[2] Script=[3] Server=[4] Path=[5] [File] Extension=[6] URL=[7]


 * 1) Can be "Edit text", "Edit file" or "Diff text".
 * 2) Can currently only be MediaWiki. Please let me know if your wiki engine supports the application/x-external-editor protocol.
 * 3) For MediaWiki, full URL to index.php ($wgServer + $wgScript)
 * 4) For MediaWiki, server base URL ($wgServer)
 * 5) For MediaWiki, wiki document root ($wgScriptPath) - this is used to rewrite links from relative URLs to absolute URLs for previews
 * 6) What should the extension of the file be? For text, MediaWiki uses ".wiki"
 * 7) Where can the resource be found

Example control file
Control file generated by Mediawiki 1.18 and later for this page:

Control file generated by Mediawiki 1.16 and lower for this page: