将上下文菜单项添加到Windows资源管理器

Question

I've been searching for days about this, but haven't found anything. I am trying to find out how I can add a context menu item to the windows explorer. I do not want it for specific filetypes, BUT I want it to appear on everything inside a specific path. For example, I want right-click menus of anything inside "C:\\folder" to contain this item, but it shouldn't appear outside this folder...

Is that possible? Any help will be really appreciated!

Thanks in advance, John.

Answer 1

The normal way this is achieved is to add it to the Registry under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Classes/Folder/Shell

However in your specific case you want to do some preprocessing before it is displayed (eg is it in the specified directory) which wouldn't work with a simple registry alteration.

I think there is a way to force you way into any operation and add a hook to it. I'm talking about old school knowledge now though and I cannot think what the technology would be called. I think its how you would have, for example, forced your way into the rendering engine to put custom skins on normal explorer windows or inject an extra button into the title bar of apps like you used to see back in the day.

It just occurred to me that adding a button to the windows title bar might have given a search starting point, I found this article which refers to subclassing windows components and injecting your own behaviour. I think that is what I'm talking about above:

• http://www.codeproject.com/KB/wtl/titlebar.aspx

Hope this gives you a new direction to search in.