Clicking on "my computer" in the start menu returns a GUID link instead of a direct link. For example:
::{20B04FE1-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08012B30309D}
How can I convert it to a normal path so that I can get a list of directories and files with the help of QDir?
UPDATE
I'm not trying to get a list of drives. It is easily done with Qt. I just want to know that a user clicked My Computer in the start menu. (My application can replace Windows Explorer).
You are looking there at an item in the Shell Namespace, not in the filesystem.
Introduction to the Shell Namespace:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc144090(v=vs.85).aspx
The shell shows many things which don't exist as files, My Computer being one. The Desktop is another - the shell desktop is a merged view of the All Users desktop folder, your personal desktop folder, and a few other items which are purely virtual like the recycle bin.
To find out more about the item you can use SHParseDisplayName to convert a name to an ITEMIDLIST.
If you intend to offer a replacement for Explorer, good luck!
Related
I'm looking to have a way of opening files in my Qt app within a context menu, like opening any image file in Photos or Photoshop. Mostly what I'm finding though is either possibly out of date ways of doing it, like way earlier versions of Qt, or incomplete posts about doing something with shell extensions, but it's mostly adding an icon to custom file extensions in explorer, not the opening actions. Or ways of doing it with the general Windows API I think, which I don't know how this would "connect" with my Qt app to open a file in it, and the windows api is very scary to me.
Is the way of doing now with a newly added module in Qt using C++, or maybe something with an "installscript.qs" file, or "package.xml"? I've never seen or used a .qs file before. Basically, I'm not sure where to look for how to do it the most updated and easiest way.
The screenshot below is an example of the functionality im talking about. With my Qt app not being open, a file of the types I want (.jpg, .png, .gif, etc) is right clicked, and I can click like "Edit with MyQtAppName", or open the "Open with" sub menu and click "MyQtAppName". Then ultimately this files full path would be passed into my Qt app as a string somehow. I don't know how this pass of the path string happens yet, but yeah. Any help appreciated.
I've used Qt for widget development a fair bit. That's straightforward. But how could I write a program that can be invoked from anywhere on Windows?
Say I've selected some text in a web browser. I want to be able to invoke my program via keystroke, maybe show a little list containing a list of text files I can select (ideally where the cursor is), and then add the selected text to that file.
How can I do this?
I suggest you to have a look at:
https://skycoder42.github.io/QtService/index.html
https://forum.qt.io/topic/67043/qt-daemon
Our company has an installer written in C++ that creates program shortcuts using IShellLink as described in:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb776891%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
On Windows 8 all shortcuts created in the Start Menu will also show as titles on the Start Screen. What we're looking to do is programmically control which icons are shown on the Start Screen. In the following article it describes the option "System.AppUserModel.StartPinOption" as:
To create add an app shortcut without pinning it to the Start screen
view, you can set the following property on the shortcut:
System.AppUserModel.StartPinOption = 1. The symbolic name for 1 is
APPUSERMODEL_STARTPINOPTION_NOPINONINSTALL.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/jj673981%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
This appears to be possible using the Windows Installer, however I haven't found a way to accomplish the same functionality programmatically in C++ given our context.
If anyone has any information about this, or an example of some sort, it would be much appreciated.
One thing I found was that "..NewInstall" literally means that. User customizations to the tiles seem to be retained even after you delete/update the .lnk files. This is probably a good thing as updates won't reset the user's environment, but it does mean that I needed to use fresh installs of Windows 8 during testing. I used a VM box to minimize the pain. At least I don't know how to delete the properties once set from within the environment.
I want to make a program that moves certain named folders (and all files contained) from directory A to directory B. It was suggested to code in C++. So I was wondering if anyone knew of a simple way to do this, if they could give me a link, and if anyone know's where it's possible to set the directories as variables that can be loaded from a text file. I'm asking this question, because I want to basically have all my program settings and whatnot from the appdata folder since I move between computers alot, be easily transferable.
settings.txt (This is an example of what I mean.)
fldrget = (Folder Name)
fldrdir = (Path to Folder)
fldrplc = (Folder Destination)
Would creating an xml document be a better idea as far as the txt document goes?
Additional Information: OS: Windows(XP, Vista, 7) and I'd like to make this a GUI, but as I'm not familiar with any C language, I'll settle for basics first if anyone can give me a push in the right direction.
Can you provide a bit more information? Are you wanting to write a console application or a GUI? What platform are you targeting? You could use the Win32 API, Boost, Qt, Wx, or a number of others.
You may want to look into using PowerShell. It is much more friendly for a new comer and built-in to Windows 7 and freely available for Windows XP. Just do a google search for moving a directory using PowerShell to get started
This seemed like a common question but after doing some searching, I wasn't really able to find my answers. There is an article on this here:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/shell/shellextguide1.aspx
But it's for a very old version of Visual Studio. I'm using VS 2008, so the instructions and interfaces don't seem to match what I'm seeing.
I want to create a simple shell extension using C++ that creates a context menu for files with extension .GZ. When right clicking on these files, I should be able to click my context menu item and have a callback in code to do some sort of operation on that file.
Other context menu items would do things like spawn modless dialogs to accept user input before executing some action.
From what I've seen, ATL is used for this but I have never used ATL, so all of the object types and interfaces are very confusing to me. It wouldn't be so bad if I had a proper tutorial or documentation to read.
Can anyone help me out? Isn't there some sort of tutorial out there that isn't 10 years old?
I can't tell you exactly how to write a shell extension, but I will provide a number of tips. Writing a Shell Extension offers some significant advantages over the much simpler “registry-only” method:
With a Shell Extension, you can dynamically create a context menu item (or submenu) that is more relevant to the selected file(s). For example, if you are writing a Shell Extension for zip files, it is possible to create a submenu within the context menu that shows the entire contents of the zip.
You can handle multiple files simultaneously, which may be more beneficial not just for performance purposes but also so that you can work out what to do based on the selection as a whole rather than just for each file.
Some of the downfalls to Shell Extensions are:
Substantially increased complexity. Be prepared to spend a lot of effort on this to get it working. Have a home-espresso machine installed next to your computer and/or hire someone to make you coffee.
Substantially increased difficulty in debugging. Ditto about coffee.
It's difficult to write a Shell Extension because they can be very hard to debug.
Shell Extensions are loaded by the explorer.exe process, and without specific configuration of Explorer, you need to force-quit the explorer.exe process so that you can install a newer version of your Shell Extension. There is a way to get Explorer to unload DLLs that it is no longer using, but you should only do this on a development machine and not on a deployment target:
In RegEdit, browse to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
Add a new DWORD key called “AlwaysUnloadDLL” and set its value to 1.
Restart explorer.
This works most of the time, but there may still be times where you need to close Explorer because the Shell Extension was not unloaded.
Keep in mind that your Shell Extension may be loaded by other applications, for example, if you right-click on a file with an applications “open file” dialog, then your Shell Extension will be loaded into that application, and not Explorer.
If your Shell Extension causes a runtime error, quite often the result will simply be that your context menu item does not show, very rarely will you be told that your Shell Extension failed to load or that it caused a runtime error.
Configuration can be hard, even with an installation, registry data needs to be created in several places, and depending where you want your context menu to show, the places in the registry may differ between different versions of Windows.
What you'll need to do:
Visual Studio offers some shortcuts to creating Shell Extensions, but basically you'll need to create a COM DLL. A Shell Extension for context menu items must implement both the IContextMenu interface and the IShellExtInit interface.
In the IShellExtInit::Initialize() method, you can obtain the selected files from the IDataObject parameter. From memory, the data is in “Drag-n-Drop” format, so you need to get an HDROP handle from the IDataObject and query the files from there (this is from memory, it may actually be different than as I described here, so proceed with caution).
Once your DLL is ready to be “installed”, you must copy it somewhere, and then run regsvr32 to make sure it is registered.
Follow this guide to know where to put registry keys.
There may be issues with 64-bit Windows, if you build a 32-bit DLL it may not load in 64-bit Explorer… so keep this in mind if you are having trouble with 64-bit Windows.
Your DLL will actually have two GUIDs associated with it. I can't remember exactly how it works, but one GUID refers to the DLL itself and the other refers to the actual Shell Extension. Make sure you use the GUID of the actual Shell Extension when creating keys in the registry where a GUID is required.
All things considered… (tl;dr)
Weigh up the costs of whether a Shell Extension is worth it. If you want to create menu items dynamically based on the selected files, then a Shell Extension may be the only way. If you want to handle all files simultaneously then you'll probably need a Shell Extension as well.
An alternative to the context menu method, could be to have a drag-n-drop target on the user's desktop or something. Explore other ways that you could have the user submit your files to your application, because a Shell Extension is often far more effort than it is worth. I found this out the hard way and I think everyone else has too.