IExplorerBrowser
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IExplorerBrowser is an easy to use, more complete version of IShellView that lets you have a complete Explorer frame on your form, with very little code. You can either have just a plain file view, or with a navigation tree and toolbar. It uses all the same settings and does all the same things as Explorer, and your program can interact with those actions to do things like browse for files, or be the basis of a namespace extension.
The only complication is that there's no event notifying of an individual file selection within the view, and getting a list of selected files is fairly complex- however there is a function to do it in the demo project.
Here's how it looks if you're just using folder view without the frames:
INamespaceTreeControl
If all you want is the navigation tree, you have the INamespaceTreeControl. It's got a decent amount of options for however you want to display things, including checkboxes. There is a wide range of events that you're notified of via the event sink, and most of these use IShellItem- the demo project does show to to convert that into a path, but it's a very useful interface to learn if you're going to be doing shell programming. The selection is reported through IShellItemArray, which is slightly easier than IDataObject.
It's got one little quirk though... you have the option to set the folder icons yourself, but if you don't want to do that and just use the default icon that you see in Explorer, you have to return -1, which requires a v-table swap. The demo project shows how to go both ways, no thanks to MSDN and their complete lack of documentation of this.
But this is by far the easiest to create way of having a full-featured Explorer-like navigation- I've made a regular TreeView into this, and it took hundreds of lines and heavy subclassing. This is a simple object. (Note that it does support some advanced features through related interfaces, like custom draw, drop handling, and accessibility... these interfaces are included in oleexp, but have not been brought to the sample project here, perhaps in the future I'll do a more in-depth one if there's any interest)
Requirements
Windows Vista or higher required as these interfaces did not exist in earlier OS versions
oleexp.tlb: Modern Interfaces Type Library v2.0 or higher (17 Jun 2015) - Only required in the IDE. Add/fix in demo references to olelib.tlb and oleexp.tlb.
These 'controls' create themselves- all you need is a blank form, and here's the creation code for a basic idea of how these things work (code to initialize some variables omitted):
Code:
Set pNST = New NamespaceTreeControl
pNST.Initialize Me.hWnd, prc, lFlag
Set pAdv = New cNSTEvents
Set pUnkAdv = pAdv
pNST.TreeAdvise pUnkAdv, lpck
pNST.InsertRoot 0, isiDesk, SHCONTF_FOLDERS, NSTCRS_EXPANDED Or NSTCRS_VISIBLE, pif