Opening multipe documents of several types at once

By Ernesto Perales Soto | 16 May 2004

VC7WinXPVisual-StudioMFCDevIntermediate

This class provides an open file dialog that shows multiple file types at once, and allows selecting multiple files at once. See Also y y Download source files - 2.78 Kb Download demo project - 31.2 Kb

Introduction
If you have a MDI application, it is not uncommon to also have several document classes. The MFC's default implementation of the open file dialog has two shortcomings that your users may find annoying: it only shows one file type at a time, and does not allow to open multiple files at once. The class explained in this article solves these issues.

Using the code

y y Add the four files included in the source code to your project. Add a new string to your string table called IDS_ALLDOCSFILTER, this will be the string shown as the filter name.

Include the extended doc manager header in your CWinApp.cpp file: Collapse | Copy Code

#include "DocManager2.h"

Create the doc manager in the first line of your InitInstance CWinApp. Notice that m_pDocManager is a member of the base class. Collapse | Copy Code

BOOL CMyApp::InitInstance() { m_pDocManager= new CDocManager2(); ... the rest of your code ... }

That is it! That was easy! Compile and try to open a file to test the new functionality.

Inside the class

If you take a peek under the CWinApp hood, you will find that it delegates file related functions to an instance of the undocumented class CDocManager (Roger Allen has a nice explanation about CDocManager here). This class is actually responsible for showing the open file dialog and for opening the document, so it is the ideal candidate for our task at hand. So let's get into work.

Showing all file types at once

The first step is to override the CDocManager::DoPromptFileName function. This function was not really made to be overridden, so in order to make a slight change,

you have to copy the base class code and tweak it a little. The following code adds a new filter to the filter list: Collapse | Copy Code
BOOL CDocManager2::DoPromptFileName(CString& fileName, UINT nIDSTitle, DWORD lFlags, BOOL bOpenFileDialog, CDocTemplate* pTemplate) { ... original code ... if (pTemplate != NULL) { ASSERT_VALID(pTemplate); _AfxAppendFilterSuffix(strFilter, dlgFile.m_ofn, pTemplate, &strDefault); } else { // append all docs filter CString strFilters; POSITION pos = m_templateList.GetHeadPosition(); // for each doc template while (pos != NULL) { CDocTemplate* pTemplate = (CDocTemplate*)m_templateList.GetNext(pos); CString strFilterExt; // append its extension to the filter list pTemplate->GetDocString(strFilterExt,CDocTemplate::filterExt); if(!strFilterExt.IsEmpty()) strFilters+=_T('*')+strFilterExt+_T(';'); } // delete the trailing ;

strFilters.Delete(strFilters.GetLength()-1,1); CString allDocsFilter; VERIFY(allDocsFilter.LoadString(IDS_ALLDOCSFILTER)); strFilter += allDocsFilter; strFilter += (TCHAR)'\0'; strFilter += strFilters; // next string please

strFilter += (TCHAR)'\0';

// last string

dlgFile.m_ofn.nMaxCustFilter++; ... original code ... // select the all documents filter as the default filter dlgFile.m_ofn.nFilterIndex=0; INT_PTR nResult = dlgFile.DoModal(); fileName.ReleaseBuffer(); return nResult == IDOK; }

Unfortunately, this code uses the internal MFC function

_AfxAppendFilterSuffix. To make the code compile, the only solution I found

was to copy the code verbatim from MFC source files. Let's hope it does not change a lot in future versions of MFC!

Opening multiple files at once

To open multiple files at once, we must override CDocManager::OnFileOpen. Apart from adding the obvious OFN_ALLOWMULTISELECT flag, we must add code to iterate the selected files list and open the documents one by one: Collapse | Copy Code
void CDocManager2::OnFileOpen() { // prompt the user (with all document templates)

CString newName; if (!DoPromptFileName(newName, AFX_IDS_OPENFILE, OFN_HIDEREADONLY | OFN_FILEMUSTEXIST | OFN_ALLOWMULTISELECT, TRUE, NULL)) return; // open cancelled LPSTR szName=newName.GetBuffer(); // replace all the embebbed nulls, CString can not handle them well for(int i=0;i<newName.GetAllocLength();i++) { if(_T('\0')==szName[i]) if(_T('\0')!=szName[i+1]) szName[i]=_T('*'); }

newName.ReleaseBuffer(); // get a vector of all names std::vector<CString> vectorFiles=split(newName,_T("*")); CString strPath=vectorFiles[0]; if(1==vectorFiles.size()) AfxGetApp()->OpenDocumentFile(strPath); else { for(std::vector<CString>::iterator i=vectorFiles.begin()+1; i!=vectorFiles.end();i++) { AfxGetApp()->OpenDocumentFile(strPath+_T('\\')+*i); } } }

Now, we have a class that behaves as we want. Happy coding!

License
This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)