You can click the "view" link to see it as text.

On the build page, there aren't any "view" links (unless I'm really that daft)

The list of build artifacts contain direct links to the artifacts, as well as the little "fingerprint" icon.

The "view" ilnk in the workspace viewer doesn't really help for looking at build artifacts for older
builds, only the most recent one.

My case is a bit different, but I suspect it has the same code behind it.
I want to display a xml file from my workspace which has a link to xslt in it.
The 'view' link displays the text, but without the xslt applied (I can
understand that). The link to the file itself opens an 'Open with...' dialog,
because the Content-type is application/octet-stream.
Can the content-type be automatically detected from the file extension?

The MIME type mapping comes from the underlying servlet container. Which one do
you use? Winstone?

I experience this issue when using the default Hudson container, I'm assuming
that's Winstone

Answering koshuke's question: Yes, I am using the Winstone servlet engine.
I found (in Winstone's issue list) your request for more default mime types in
the Winstone resources
(http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1746201&group_id=98922&atid=622500).

The mime types in the Winstone properties are:
WebAppConfig.DefaultMimeTypes=jpg=image/jpeg:jpeg=image/jpeg:gif=image/gif:css=text/css:js=text/javascript:pdf=application/pdf:txt=text/plain:html=text/html:png=image/png:zip=application/zip:jar=application/java-archive

I added some extra extension/mime-type combinations to the Hudson web.xml, as
Rick Knowles (Winstone author) suggested.
That works, but of course my changes will be gone in the next Hudson update.

Could you add some entries to the Hudson web.xml?

Some extensions I am missing are:
xml: text/xml
xslt: application/xslt+xml or text/xml
ear: ???? (don't know if a mime-type exists)
war: ???? (don't know if a mime-type exists)

Even better would be a way to add your own mappings external to Hudson, but that
would mean an enhancement to the servlet container (Winstone in my case) not
Hudson itself.
Well, maybe I should switch to a servlet container that supports this by
default, we deploy our own application on Oracle Application Server (Weblogic in
the future), so I could use that. I like the simplicity of the embedded Winstone
container though.

Any chance you can send us a patch from what you did?

Created an attachment (id=781)
Patch for web.xml, modify to your needs

I created a unified diff file for the web.xml. It is very simple, modify to your
needs.

Code changed in hudson
User: : kohsuke
Path:
trunk/hudson/main/war/resources/WEB-INF/web.xml
trunk/www/changelog.html
http://fisheye4.cenqua.com/changelog/hudson/?cs=19730
Log:
[FIXED JENKINS-3803] In 1.316.

Could we also add this to the web.xml to allow serving up of SVG (my build
generates some of these)?
svg=image/svg+xml

Code changed in jenkins
User: George Shakhnazaryan
Path:
war/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml
http://jenkins-ci.org/commit/jenkins/c1d2c945465d30efb63de7abce51d95289170e63
Log:
Adding the video/webm mime type for files with extension .webm. The change is similar to JENKINS-3803, just a different extension.