Embedding a File Explorer instance in a Windows Forms application form

Question

My (C#, .NET 3.5) application generates files and, in addition to raising events that can be caught and reacted to, I want to display the target folder to the user in a form. The file-list is being shown within the same form as other information.

I'm using an instance of the WebBrowser control (System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser), then navigating to the folder. This shows some default view of the explorer window, with the file summary panel on the left and the files in the 'Tiles' (large icon and text) view.

For example,

wb.Navigate(@"c:\path\to\folder\");

I'd like to suppress the panel and to view the file list in the Details view. The user can get to this via a right-click, context menu, but I'd like it to come up automatically.

I'd rather not have to build my own TreeView, DataGridView or whatever; the WebBrowser control does all the updating and re-sorting and whatnot 'for free'.

Is there a better way? A different control to use or some additional arguments to pass to the control?

And if I could trap events (for example, files being selected/renamed/double-clicked, etc.) then all the better!

Answer 1

In order to handle renaming, deleting and make other customization you need to write your own file explorer. WebBrowser control is not suitable for your needs. It's just a wrapper over ActiveX component.
You should check this codeproject article. It contains an implementation of file explorer. There are few more samples of file browser:
one
two

Answer 2

WARNING: Long post with lots of code.

When you navigate the web browser control to a file system folder the web browser control hosts a shell view window that in turn hosts the explorer list view. In fact this is exactly the same thing that the Explorer process does as well as the file dialogs and Internet Explorer. This shell window is not a control so there are no methods that can be called on it or events that can be subscribed to but it can receive windows messages and it can be sub-classed.

It turns out that the part of your question dealing with setting the view to Details automatically is actually quite easy. In your web browser control's Navigated event simply find the handle to the shell view window and send it a WM_COMMAND message with a particular shell constant (SHVIEW_REPORT). This is an undocumented command but it is supported on all Windows platforms up to and including Windows 2008 and almost certainly will be on Windows 7. Some code to add to your web browser's form demonstrates this:

    private delegate int EnumChildProc(IntPtr hwnd, IntPtr lParam);

    [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    private static extern IntPtr SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd, int Msg,
        IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam);

    [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    private static extern int EnumChildWindows(IntPtr hWndParent,
        EnumChildProc lpEnumFunc, IntPtr lParam);

    [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
    private static extern int GetClassName(IntPtr hWnd, StringBuilder lpClassName,
        int nMaxCount);

    private const int WM_COMMAND = 0x0111;
    private const int SHVIEW_REPORT = 0x702C;
    private const string SHELLVIEW_CLASS = "SHELLDLL_DefView";

    private IntPtr m_ShellView;

    void webBrowser1_Navigated(object sender, WebBrowserNavigatedEventArgs e)
    {
        m_ShellView = IntPtr.Zero;
        EnumChildWindows(webBrowser1.Handle, EnumChildren, IntPtr.Zero);
        if (m_ShellView != IntPtr.Zero)
        {
            SendMessage(m_ShellView, WM_COMMAND, (IntPtr)SHVIEW_REPORT, (IntPtr)0);
        }
    }

    private int EnumChildren(IntPtr hwnd, IntPtr lParam)
    {
        int retval = 1;

        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(SHELLVIEW_CLASS.Length + 1);
        int numChars = GetClassName(hwnd, sb, sb.Capacity);
        if (numChars == SHELLVIEW_CLASS.Length)
        {
            if (sb.ToString(0, numChars) == SHELLVIEW_CLASS)
            {
                m_ShellView = hwnd;
                retval = 0;
            }
        }

        return retval;
    }

Every time the web browser navigates to a new window (including when a folder is opened from within the explorer view) a new shell view window is created so the message must be re-sent to the new window in every Navigated event.

For the second part of your question you would like to receive events from the explorer list view. This is quite a bit more difficult than the first part. To do this you would need to sub-class the list view window and then monitor the windows messages for ones that interest you (such as WM_LBUTTONDBLCLK). In order to sub-class a window you would need to create your own class derived from the NativeWindow class and assign it the handle of the window that you need to monitor. You can then override its Window procedure and handle the various messages as you wish. Below is an example of creating a double click event - it is relatively simple but to get extensive access to the explorer list view may involve a lot more work than you are willing to do.

Add this to your form:

    private ExplorerListView m_Explorer;

    void OnExplorerItemExecuted(object sender, ExecuteEventArgs e)
    {
        string msg = string.Format("Item to be executed: {0}{0}{1}", 
            Environment.NewLine, e.SelectedItem);
        e.Cancel = (MessageBox.Show(msg, "", MessageBoxButtons.OKCancel) 
            == DialogResult.Cancel);
    }

and these two lines to the Navigated event handler (right after the SendMessage):

    m_Explorer = new ExplorerListView(m_ShellView);
    m_Explorer.ItemExecuted += OnExplorerItemExecuted;

Then add the following classes:

class ExplorerListView : NativeWindow
{

    public event EventHandler<ExecuteEventArgs> ItemExecuted;

    [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
    private static extern IntPtr SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd, int Msg,
        IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam);

    [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
    private static extern IntPtr FindWindowEx(IntPtr hwndParent,
        IntPtr hwndChildAfter, string lpszClass, string lpszWindow);

    private const int WM_LBUTTONDBLCLK = 0x0203;

    private const int LVM_GETNEXTITEM = 0x100C;
    private const int LVM_GETITEMTEXT = 0x1073;

    private const int LVNI_SELECTED = 0x0002;

    private const string EXPLORER_LISTVIEW_CLASS = "SysListView32";

    public ExplorerListView(IntPtr shellViewHandle)
    {
        base.AssignHandle(FindWindowEx(shellViewHandle, IntPtr.Zero, 
            EXPLORER_LISTVIEW_CLASS, null));
        if (base.Handle == IntPtr.Zero)
        {
            throw new ArgumentException("Window supplied does not encapsulate an explorer window.");
        }
    }


    protected override void WndProc(ref Message m)
    {
        switch (m.Msg)
        {
            case WM_LBUTTONDBLCLK:
                if (OnItemExecution() != 0) return;
                break;
            default:
                break;
        }
        base.WndProc(ref m);
    }

    private int OnItemExecution()
    {
        int cancel = 0;
        ExecuteEventArgs args = new ExecuteEventArgs(GetSelectedItem());
        EventHandler<ExecuteEventArgs> temp = ItemExecuted;
        if (temp != null)
        {
            temp(this, args);
            if (args.Cancel) cancel = 1;
        }
        return cancel;
    }

    private string GetSelectedItem()
    {
        string item = null;

        IntPtr pStringBuffer = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(2048);
        IntPtr pItemBuffer = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(LVITEM)));

        int selectedItemIndex = SendMessage(base.Handle, LVM_GETNEXTITEM, (IntPtr)(-1), (IntPtr)LVNI_SELECTED).ToInt32();
        if (selectedItemIndex > -1)
        {
            LVITEM lvi = new LVITEM();
            lvi.cchTextMax = 1024;
            lvi.pszText = pStringBuffer;
            Marshal.StructureToPtr(lvi, pItemBuffer, false);
            int numChars = SendMessage(base.Handle, LVM_GETITEMTEXT, (IntPtr)selectedItemIndex, pItemBuffer).ToInt32();
            if (numChars > 0)
            {
                item = Marshal.PtrToStringUni(lvi.pszText, numChars);
            }
        }

        Marshal.FreeHGlobal(pStringBuffer);
        Marshal.FreeHGlobal(pItemBuffer);

        return item;
    }

    struct LVITEM
    {
        public int mask;
        public int iItem;
        public int iSubItem;
        public int state;
        public int stateMask;
        public IntPtr pszText;
        public int cchTextMax;
        public int iImage;
        public IntPtr lParam;
        public int iIndent;
        public int iGroupId;
        int cColumns; // tile view columns
        public IntPtr puColumns;
        public IntPtr piColFmt;
        public int iGroup;

    }
}

public class ExecuteEventArgs : EventArgs
{
    public string SelectedItem { get; private set; }
    public bool Cancel { get; set; }

    internal ExecuteEventArgs(string selectedItem)
    {
        SelectedItem = selectedItem;
    }
}

This should give you an idea of what you would need to do. If you want more than fairly simple events you may want to look for a alternative control, though from what I have seen in the free and low cost areas there are some pretty decent controls but they all have some quirks and will not give a seamless explorer experience.

Remember this code was put together fairly quickly without error handling or comments and ignoring several issues such as multiple selected items, so use it as a guideline and at your own risk.

Answer 3

LogicNP Software has two controls (FileView and ShComboBox) that do what your looking for: http://www.ssware.com/fldrview.htm

You can download a trial from their page, however it's ~130$ for the license.

Answer 4

I have written a library that might be able to help you. You can find it at: http://gong-shell.sourceforge.net/

The control you're looking for is the ShellView. There's tutorials there on how to create a simple Windows Explorer clone in only a few lines too.

Note for .NET 4.0 users: Gong-shell is currently broken for 4.0. The framework introduced changes in Interop and it will build just fine but cause different issues when interfacing with shell32 (notably the shellicon api, leading to an unmanaged null pointer dereference).