Anyone else feel this way about file search?

[BC_Programmer]

As useful as the Search companion and search tools are in XP and Vista, is anybody else like me and sometimes want to use the good old File Search tool provided with windows 98?:



there is something just utilitarian about it that I like- and you don't necessarily have to click through a million balloons to find the right options, AND the search won't start over if you change files on the disk.


Anyway- I've decided to rebuild this tool (again, actually, I had a complete exact replica completely compatible with XP/Vista that looked and functioned almost exactly the same, but FASTER then the 98 version, and didn't have the limit on the number of files it could find.) and wanted to know if I would be the only person who used it, or wether I should bother to create an installer for the little fellow.

[evilfantasy]

Agreed. Fashes whistles and farts sell a product. But it doesn't mean they make it better.

[patio]

I'll use it in a heartbeat...

How 'bout revising the Vista ( "jump thru 7 hoops to get to basic Explorer settings"  ) while you're at it ? ?

[xcharge50]

I will use it! But I think just all the file with a read me in a zip (RAR or else...)is enough

[BC_Programmer]

I will use it! But I think just all the file with a read me in a zip (RAR or else...)is enough

well, I would like to do it that way, But right now I'm just getting my "BCFile" File Object library to the point where I can use it for this type of project, (COM DLL) which will need to be registered, as with a few VBAccelerator Controls (for the Listview and so forth)

BUT- I could simply include a batch file with the appropriate regsvr32 commands. and simply specify that that should be run before the program is. On the other hand it would be nice to have an uninstaller.

Just finishing up the Search Classes that this would use. I remember my main hurdle with my previous attempts was that blasted Right-Click menu shown when you right click a file. I won't tell the horror story that is showing that in VB6... needless to say Pidls aren't fun to deal with in a Pointer-enabled language like C++. VB6 only makes things worse.

And once I finished that, I upgraded to XP... and none of the icons had alpha...

I lost the old version ages ago along with several other projects, but it might be hiding somewhere on my old CD-Rs. I've searched them a few times for old stuff and have come up with a few old treasures here and there, but annoyingly enough only projects I had already completely rewritten and improved ten-fold.


"obvious" improvements I should make likely include regular expression file specification matching as well as regular expressions for the containing text- but those are "trivial" to add compared to what I've already done re: the file search APIs.

I'll use it in a heartbeat...

How 'bout revising the Vista ( "jump thru 7 hoops to get to basic Explorer settings"  ) while you're at it ? ?

I only count three hoops.

press alt.
press t.
press o.

folder options.

Or is that not it?

[BC_Programmer]

OK... I cracked my own whip here, and finally created the "Search" Project for this. So far, this is what it looks like:





the only code I've written so far is the code to create the tabs, switch between the controls on each tab, and create the statusbar text.

The "Look In" combo only lists Drives right now- but I did have a control that would show the namespace stuff that the win98 Find dialog does.

Include Subfolders and Browse controls are missing too, and I haven't added the menus yet (toying with the idea of using  VB accelerator Commandbar for that one, all the more appealing since I have already written a large module specifically to transform a XML document into a menu... but that is yet another reference to MSXML... grrr.

So far so good, all the search code is near completion, so soon it will be a matter of simply putting it to work, and trying to duplicate the positive nuances of the Win98 Search.

[patio]

I only count three hoops.

press alt.
press t.
press o.

folder options.

Or is that not it?

No.
I was speaking of getting to an Explorer window itself...
Not folder options once in.

[BC_Programmer]

Ah, ok.

What about Windows key +E?

My new favourite shortcut.

[Dusty]

Anyone tried Locate32 from http://www.locate32.net/ ?  Opinion?

[Broni]

I have not touched Windows search for a long time. It simply sucks.
I use SuperFinder: http://freewarewiki.com/SuperFinder, which installs under Explorer right click.

[BC_Programmer]

blast you people, quit showing me the competition!

Although my FileSearch Class can already do everything those can do, it's merely making a bloody UI around it that pains me.

But the SuperFinder gave me another idea, Excluded masks. I did the same for attributes, since my "Directory" class needs to separate SubDirectories and Files, but it never occured to me to do the same for File masks. A useful feature with minimal effort.


Creating XP/Vista compatible UIs with VB6 is a huge pain but well worth the effort for no reason. 

[Broni]

Waiting for your final product

[BC_Programmer]

Some good progress has been made. Current Screenie:



Few obvious issues being that the Exclude mask doesn't work, since it's testing it against the full path- for the same reason that the "Filename" column is showing the directory as well, this should be a separate column.

Icons are working perfectly, including the Alpha Channel, no issues there, which I was thinking was my main problem.



I am not surprisingly getting Errors (which are ignored in the code, so the file simply doesn't display) when trying to get the info (GetFileInformationByHandle) of some OS protected files, Like pagefile.sys.

Also random Folders keep sneaking into the results even though I'm masking FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY, which is annoying to say the least.

The thing is if it matches the search the file should be included, especially for mask/excludemask searches, since they don't *really* need the info that my CFile class so cleverly tries to retrieve automatically.


Might revise the "size" field, but I really can't think of a better method, right now it counts the number of times the total number of bytes must be divided by 1024 for it to go below 1024, and then uses that number as an index into a String array ( {"Bytes","KB","MB","GB"} for now), and tacks on the actual byte count in brackets.


And some UI changes that I'll make soon involving resizing, which works fairly well, but the Boxes should expand in width along with the rest of it.


So... it's a work in progress.

[Broni]

Keep going

[BC_Programmer]

Thanks

say I noticed something in the above image...


the columnheaders from size onwards to the right are using the icon for a DLL/OCX...

I must examine this issue...

Also a thing that I really need to address would be the crash that occurs when trying to search more then once LOL

both of these related to that blasted ImageList...


Although the Right-click context menu is working seamlessly with this app, which is a bit of spoils from a long battle with PIDLs a few months back to get it to work. 


UI design angers me. I prefer the coding portion... It's a necessary evil though...


EDIT:

fixed the icon bug. Also works for searches after the initial search.