Content-Type Node Registry

I am interested in developing a node registry for associating node types, content-types and filename extentions together. There are many instances when a chunk of data needs to be inserted into the CMS and choosing the right node type must be done. The two usual meta-data items typically available are content-type and/or filename extention. If these could be used to create nodes, it would reduce a lot of hard-coding that currently goes on.

In my vision, an admin could edit the mapping to direct certain file types to become whatever node type he/she specifies. Each module would then have to implement a hook to parse the data chunk into a proper format and create a node/nodes in response. Both content-type and extention could be expressed as regular expressions.

An example of this would be a mapping with

A default node type would have to be specified. This would not be part of the registry node type resolution unless specifically requested. Possible conflicts between multiple entries that would all match are resolved by the weight parameter. Data would be processed in ascending order of this weight value (i.e. the "exe" entry would match before getting to application/.*). Perhaps a registry_resolve function could return the function name of a node creation hook:

  function drupal_registry_resolve($query, $return_default=0) {
    // $query is an array containing keys content-type and/or extention
    // a non-zero value for $return_default would return the value specified for the default node type
    ...
    return $nodetype . "_create_hook";
  }

This would be called like:

  $new_node_data = array('uid' => $owners_uid, 'title' => 'hello.world', 'content-type' => 'video/mpeg', 'data' => $some_video_data_chunk);

  $nodehook = drupal_registry_resolve($new_node_data, 1);

  // no specific registry entry was found, use default (filestore for now..)
  $newnodes = $nodehook($new_node_data);

  // node has now been saved

If a node_create_hook didn't know what to do with the given data, return false or nothing at all. Otherwise, return an array containing newly created node(s).

Some issues that this brings up are:

1. Does the poster (not current user...cron?) have permission to create nodes of this type?
2. If we did know which permission to check against for node creation, user_access would have to be modified to accept a uid other than the current user's uid.

I could see the mailhandler module using this to sort out message attachments, the file upload process could use this to intelligently store arbitrary file types in a more appropriate format than just storing the data. Content could be created using alternative means such as WebDav. Many groupware applications store all kinds of files and many of them. This could make such collections much easier to search, manage and use due to the additional context that the more specific modules bring.

Though this could be implemented as a module and a patch, I think it belongs in Drupal core. It would need to become part of the module API to be of any use to anyone. Your thoughts and comments are requested.