[JDHill]

Sorry Olivier, but writing a general-purpose replacement for part of something as fundamental as Explorer is far outside the scope of the plugin. The plugin is a client of the operating system, not an operating system in and of itself -- where Windows offers well-known customization hooks, I do take advantage of them, as in the case of the preview pane that I add in the plugin's custom file browser dialog. This case is different though; finding and listing directory structures correctly is no trivial thing, and it would be poor programming practice to go around Windows in this area, rather than using the services that it provides. An example of that is evident even in this conversation -- the capability I described above, which you are apparently averse to using, was added in Vista, and Windows 7 adds even more (see Libraries under wikipedia's Windows Explorer entry) -- where would users be if I was providing a custom folder tree which could, by definition, know nothing about these types of changes? So, it is better here to remain generic and let Windows handle the scenario how it sees fit -- if they decided that Explorer should show plain-vanilla shortcuts in its tree and pushed the change out in a Windows Update, your existing plugin would automatically gain that new capability.

I have already spent not just a little time researching this for you, since I am no expert on the details of using shortcuts in Windows, and I have found you a solution that will work, and which requires an absolute minimum of effort on your part; I'm sorry if it's not enough, but in this particular case, that is as far as I am going to go. If you want this browser to work differently, you will need to talk to Microsoft about it.

[osuire]

User vs programmers.
The usual mis-understanding.
I'm just asking for something that I feel is useful, logical, and legitimate.
But I do get your point, and now I understand why you don't want to do it.
And I can't blame you if Microsoft sucks.

--
Olivier

[osuire]

I wonder if it's the same on Mac OS...

--
Olivier

[JDHill]

Finder (OSX equivalent of Explorer) works differently; there is no separate tree view of the file system. Rather, when you browse for a folder, it uses the same UI as when you browse for a file, except that only folders are selectable -- files are visible, but greyed-out. Aliases (shortcuts) to folders are selectable and you can expand them like any other folder, so for purposes of this discussion, you'd probably prefer it, but on the whole, I find file/folder browsing on OSX to be quite annoying. You can google 'osx finder' to see some images.

[osuire]

Thanks for the info Jeremy.
Any plan for a iRhino plug-in ?

--
Olivier

[JDHill]

Yes, but there's no SDK yet.

[Fille]

Great JD! Looking forward to it (I really like the UI of the Mac version)!!!


Philip