Is it possible through labview to set and read window¿s based file properties​?

Question

Any file in XP operating system has file properties associated with it, such as, size, location, when the file was created, modified and last accessed. I know that Labview has the ability to access the size and modified property. Other file types such as image format types jpg, bmp and tif have additional associated properties such as: title, subject, author, and comments. Is it possible through labview to read and set these properties programmatically?

Answer 1

Hpopenoe wrote:
> Any file in XP operating system has file properties associated with
> it, such as, size, location, when the file was created, modified and
> last accessed. I know that Labview has the ability to access the size
> and modified property. Other file types such as image format types
> jpg, bmp and tif have additional associated properties such as: title,
> subject, author, and comments. Is it possible through labview to read
> and set these properties programmatically?
Well, you can most probably do that by calling Windows API functions.
Note however that the properties you mention are not generic Windows
file properties but file specific internal attributes. Explorer does at
least in XP handle some of those properties and shows them to the user
but does so with internal file type handlers to extract the properties
from the file.
I'm not sure those file type handlers are actually available for other
applications than Explorer without quite some work. If they are
available they are certainly not part of the standard Win32 API but most
probably part of the Windows shell component and I would guess not just
through normal API function calls, but through the shell namespace
enumeration, which is built on COM interfaces, something you only can
call from standard programming languages, most of them are done in C++
(and if you are a little more persistant in standard C).
So you are likely to need to either write your own DLL doing the nitty
gritty work of calling the shell interface and using that DLL in LabVIEW
or find an Active X component which does the work for you. No doubt
there is such an Active X component somewhere but how good and expensive
is always a big question.
Rolf Kalbermatter
Rolf Kalbermatter
CIT Engineering Netherlands
a division of Test & Measurement Solutions