CODEWITHSUNDEEP
.netwindowsspecial-folders
andyhasit
andyhasit

Reputation: 15289

.Net use of special folder notation

I want to be able to do something like this: 

IO.Directory.Exists("%USERPROFILE%")

The reason being that I want to specify one of the directories which my application will use, as plain text in a config file. In some cases I will want it to be nested under the user profile, in which case the config file would read something like:

...
LocalDbDirectory = %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\My Toolkit\
...

Or I might want it to be in a network location, in which case it would read something like:

...
LocalDbDirectory = N:\Common\My Toolkit Databases\
...

So I need to be able to interpret the shorthand notation with methods such as IO.Directory.Exists(...) or equivalent.

Any ideas?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 454

Answers (2)

Adam Houldsworth
Adam Houldsworth

Reputation: 64487

If the short-hands are valid environment variables, you can resolve their value:

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        string val = Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables("%USERPROFILE%");
        Console.WriteLine(val);
        Console.Read();
    }

As of .NET 4, special folder support includes user profile:

Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.UserProfile);

Upvotes: 3

Alex K.
Alex K.

Reputation: 175766

You need to run them through Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables(path); where path is @"%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\My Toolkit\" (There is no harm in doing this for paths that do not contain %% formatted tokens)

Upvotes: 5

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