Windows 7: Library - Set Save Folder

xarden · 17 Oct 2010

Hey Shawn,
Something I've just found that's tripped me up.

If the default save location is on another drive and that drive is removed, it will no longer appear in the library.
When trying to create a new document, you may end up with a 'File System Error (512)', as a default location does not exist.
You'll then need to revisit step 3A or 4B to set one.

Brink · 17 Oct 2010

Hello Xarden,

Correct, if you were to remove the drive where the default save to location is located, then you would need to set a new save to location to stop getting the error.

bioNuke · 06 Jun 2012

Hey guys.

This may be a little outside the scope of this article - it's to do with .NET programming not detecting a custom documents folder.

I've set up my documents library to a different location (B:\Libraries\Documents) as outlined in the steps above. I've attached a screenshot of the locations window so you can see it's set up right.

Everything works ok except an application I wrote in VS C# .NET that saves & loads a file from the Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal folder (which retrieves a dynamic path to the my documents folder). This application still reads/writes to the C:\Users\Username\Documents folder for some strange reason. This may be outside the scope of this thread but I'm just curious as to how it arrives at this destination and how to fix this - Obviously the folder path it fetches is dynamic as it gets the currently logged in username, but how come it doesn't get the right documents path? :S

Brink · 06 Jun 2012

Hello CJ,

You might see if setting your program to save to the location below may work instead. It's the path to the Documents library folder itself. From there, it would actually save to whatever you had set as the default save to location in the tutorial.

%AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries\Documents.library-ms

Hope this helps,
Shawn

bioNuke · 06 Jun 2012

Thanks Shawn, I'll give that a bash tonight after work!

Brink · 06 Jun 2012

You're welcome. I hope it'll work for you.

bioNuke · 07 Jun 2012

Well as usual it wasn't quite that easy!!!

I tried several ways to load that folder, but it seems .NET applications do not like trying to load it directly. (When I tried to create a folder in the docs it said that folder already exists, which it didn't)
I ended up doing a bit of googling/prowling through stack overflow and found this neat little API that helps with libraries and such: WindowsAPICodePack

So long story short Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal gets the common documents repository for the current user.
I had to use the ShellLibrary component of the above API, use it to find the documents library as follows:

Code:

ShellLibrary Documents = ShellLibrary.Load("Documents", Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("appdata"), @"Microsoft\Windows\Libraries\"), false);

Then get the full path of the library's default save folder and then simply continue as per normal from there...

Code:

string ProgramDir = Path.Combine(Documents.DefaultSaveFolder, "NZB Watcher");
string OptionsFileName = Path.Combine(ProgramDir, "options.xml");

And Huzzah!!! It's now working perfectly! Thanks for your help mate

Brink · 07 Jun 2012

Tha'ts great news bioNuke. I'm happy to hear you got it sorted out. To bad they could just make it easier to do.

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