Thread: browse button and stuff

i'm looking into win32 programming and it seems quite hard really. there are a lot of tutorials on how to create a window and it's clear more or less. but what if i want to put a browse button on my window and next to it an edit box. When the user clicks browse he can choose a directory, then that path is shown in the edit box. in my program i want to use that path to list all the files in the directory. How can i do it? what code should i put for the browse button and an edit box and where?

What have you got so far?

Looked at CreateWindow() to make the button/edit or are you going to use the resource editor?

What IDE are you using?

i'm using dev c++.
all i have is what dev c++ generated as a new win32 project, that is a registered window class, a message loop and a WndProc function.

So are you saying there are two ways to put buttons? How to do this with resource files?

Also i looked at some other win32 code and found that there are only InitCommonControls() and DialogBox() functions, that is the class is not registered and there is no message loop. Is this better to use? What's the difference?

Originally Posted by viaxd

When the user clicks browse he can choose a directory, then that path is shown in the edit box. in my program i want to use that path to list all the files in the directory. How can i do it? what code should i put for the browse button and an edit box and where?

See this thread. What you want is the SHBrowseForFolder function, which displays a dialog box that allows the user to select a folder.

Originally Posted by viaxd

Also i looked at some other win32 code and found that there are only InitCommonControls() and DialogBox() functions, that is the class is not registered and there is no message loop. Is this better to use? What's the difference?

It uses a dialog box resource. A dialog box resource is usually designed visually, which makes it less tedious than specifying all the (x,y,width,height) values yourself in CreateWindow. DialogBox() calls CreateWindow() internally. If you need some more information about resources, you can see the links in this thread.

Dante Shamest, thank you for a very helpful reply.
First of all, i downloaded that resource editor and made an .rc file, but now i don't know what to do with it. I've included it in my project, but it seems i also need a .h file to use this resource. How do i create a header file for my resource?

this is the generated resource:

Code:

#define IDD_DLG1 1000
#define IDC_BTN1 1001
#define IDC_EDT1 1002
#define IDC_EDT2 1003
#define IDC_HDR1 1004
#define IDC_STC1 1005
IDD_DLG1 DIALOGEX 6,6,177,86
CAPTION "Renamer"
FONT 8,"MS Sans Serif",0,0
STYLE 0x10CF0000
BEGIN
  CONTROL "Browse",IDC_BTN1,"Button",0x50010000,124,11,42,20
  CONTROL "",IDC_EDT1,"Edit",0x50010000,8,12,96,13,0x00000200
  CONTROL "",IDC_EDT2,"Edit",0x50010000,82,44,84,13,0x00000200
  CONTROL "",IDC_HDR1,"SysHeader32",0x50000002,44,-8,54,12
  CONTROL "Find:",IDC_STC1,"Static",0x50000000,4,46,70,11
END

Thanks again Dante, it works now. Doesn't do much, but works
Now i need to figure out how to make Browse do what i want (using SHBrowseForFolder).
Also, do you know functions that i can use to get a list of file names in a directory and a function to rename files?

Big thanks, you've really helped me a lot!

well, everything is ok, and it's all nearly finished, but there's a problem.
rename doesnt' work. MoveFile doesn't work either. I'm assuming it's because the file is opened, don't know. There's got to be a way to rename a file...

Well, it actually works. After spending a day trying to figure out the problem, i finally solved it. MoveFile, of course, expects full paths as arguments. Silly mistake