Call TPath.GetDocumentsPath from within a Service Application

Question

I want to access some files in the MyDocuments folder when I run my service on WIndows. The documentation says that in case of Windows GetDocumentsPath returns:

• C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents (XP)
• C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents (Vista or later)

In my case I get C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile\Documents. Is it some kind of link to the Documents directory in Windows? Btw, I see no Documents folder in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile path.

Can someone explain this to me?

Answer 1

The Documents folder is a per-user folder. TPath.GetDocumentsPath() returns the Documents folder of the user account that is associated with the calling thread. But if your service is running under the SYSTEM account, not a particular user account, you cannot use TPath to obtain the path of any user-specific folder.

In order for a service to retrieve a user's Documents folder (or any other user-specific folder), the service must either:

1. be running as the desired user to begin with, not the SYSTEM account.

2. if running as the SYSTEM account, obtain a token for the desired user account, and then pass that token to SHGetFolderPath() or SHGetKnownFolderPath().

   • If the user is currently logged in, use WTSEnumerateSessions() and WTSQuerySessionInformation() to locate the user's login session, and then use WTSQueryUserToken() to get that session's user token.
   • If the user is not currently logged in, but you have the user's login credentials, you can login to the account with LogonUser() to get the user token, and then load the user's profile into memory with LoadUserProfile() before querying the folder path.