Property consumerism

  • Article

Reading properties is rather simple. First, bind to the item.  SHCreateItemFromIDList and SHCreateItemFromParsingName are appropriate for this. Then read your properties. Be sure to clean up after yourself.

IShellItem2 *psi;
if (SUCCEEDED(SHCreateItemFromParsingName(L"c:\tortoise.doc", NULL, IID_IShellItem2, (void**)&psi)))
{
IPropertyStore *pps;
if (SUCCEEDED(psi->GetPropertyStore(GPS_DEFAULT, IID_IPropertyStore, (void**)&pps)))
{
PROPVARIANT propvar = {0};
if (SUCCEEDED(pps->GetValue(PKEY_Title, &propvar)))
{
wprintf(L"Title: %s\n", PropVariantToStringWithDefault(propvar, L"<none>"));
PropVariantClear(&propvar);
}
pps->Release();
}
psi->Release();
}

Not bad for reading the title of a document! And I even checked the return results.