Capturing Program Paths

My newer applications are designed to allow a user to install pointers to other programs on their PC within my applications. This is a great way to allow the user to select specific programs that my application will start when a user wants to make use of their favorite application in conjunction with my program. The example I am using in this tutorial is my favorite graphics application.

There are 2 basic locations that these "pointers" can be retrieved from. The first is when the short cut to the application already exists on your desktop. When you right click a desktop icon you get the menu shown to the left. We will look at the steps needed after selecting the "Properties" menu item, after we look at the other way to get to this point for a program path capture.

When you select "Start" and then "All Programs" from the desktop a list of all your installed programs appear. In the case of my selection for "Paint Shop Pro 5" we find that there is more then 1 program associated with the selected menu item so we simply right click the individual program we want to capture the path of.

When we reach this point we are at the same step we were when the program we were looking for was already on the desktop. as a side note if you click on the "Send to" option of this menu you you can add the program to the desktop. The menu also lets you "Pin to the start menu". This feature lets you make this application available to you with fewer mouse clicks. We are not investigating these features right now. We just want to "Copy and Paste" path information into one of my applications.

When the "Properties" menu item is selected a panel very much like this appears (windows versions might cause this to look a little different but what we want to do will still be just fine. The character string to the right of the "Target" label is what we want. When you right click on this string the menu to the left appears. Once you click "Copy" you have captured the application path.

Now all you have to do is cancel out of this and return to my application. When you right click on the text area where you are going to place this path a menu will open giving you the "Paste" option. Once you have accomplished this, the operation is complete and my application will save this info for future usage.

Oh, by the way. Capturing the path to a website (URL) is very simple, the image below shows how.

Thanks for taking the time to read this little help function.

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Thanks

Doug Clarke