A Custom Places Bar

Another Open Dialog Customization: I found out from Dino's Article on MSDN that you can customize the links on your File Open Dialog boxes, even on a Per Process Basis. I naturally had to see that in Delphi, and it wasn't too difficult. I'm not going to explain a heck of a lot here, because it's way too late to do that. Download the code here.

Changing the default view in TAgOpenDialog

I got a mail today asking if AgOpenDialog, a dialog I'd written for D5 a few years ago, would support defining a default view - i.e. when the dialog opens, it should be configurable to display the list view in, for instance, the thumbnails view.

A little bit of help from a Visual Basic site (The "Save and Open File Dialog Demo" link) gave me a clue. Define this first:

const
  FCIDM_SHVIEW_LARGEICON = $7029;   // 28713
  FCIDM_SHVIEW_SMALLICON = $702A;   // 28714
  FCIDM_SHVIEW_LIST = $702B;        // 28715
  FCIDM_SHVIEW_REPORT = $702C;      // 28716
  FCIDM_SHVIEW_THUMBNAIL = $702D;   // 28717
  FCIDM_SHVIEW_TILE = $702E;        // 28718
type
  TAgOpenDialogView = (ovLargeIcon, ovSmallIcon, 
            ovList, ovReport, 
            ovThumbnails, ovTile);

and a published property:

property DefaultView : TAgOpenDialogView 
     read FDefaultView 
     write FDefaultView default ovLargeIcon;

Now, override the WndProc and set it up:

procedure TAgOpenDialog.WndProc(var Message: TMessage);
const
  ViewConsts : array[TAgOpenDialogView] of integer = 
(  FCIDM_SHVIEW_LARGEICON, FCIDM_SHVIEW_SMALLICON,
   FCIDM_SHVIEW_LIST,  FCIDM_SHVIEW_REPORT,  
   FCIDM_SHVIEW_THUMBNAIL,  FCIDM_SHVIEW_TILE);
var hList : THandle;
begin
  inherited;
  if (Message.Msg = WM_NOTIFY) then
    case (POFNotify(Message.LParam)^.hdr.code) of
    CDN_FOLDERCHANGE:
      begin
        if not FDefaultViewChanged then
        begin
          hList := FindWindowEx( GetParent(handle), 0, 
                'SHELLDLL_DefView', '');
          if hList <> 0 then
          begin
            SendMessage(hList, WM_COMMAND, 
                ViewConsts[FDefaultView], 0);
            FDefaultViewChanged := True;
          end;
        end;
      end;
    end;
end;

The FDefaultViewChanged is a boolean member initialized to False in the overridden Execute procedure. You can download the component and source code here. (Test project included).