Msdn file dialog filter

However only a single folder can be select within a single dialog window. Opening files is much more simple as it usually involves a single file. The only difference between the behavior between Selecting and Opening files are button labels. Saving a file is similarly easy, and also only the buttons are differently named.

One of the common problems with working with the Application. FileDialog is setting multiple file filters. Below some common examples of how to do this properly. To add a filter for multiple files use the semicolor ; :. Be sure to clear your list of filters each time. The FileDialog has its nuisances and often filters are not cleared automatically.

Hence, when creating multiple dialogs you might see filters coming from previous executed dialogs if not cleared and re-initiated properly. To do this you will want to use the New-Object cmdlet and give it the full name of the.

NET Framework class you are working with. After you have an instance of the OpenFileDialog class, you can assign values for a couple of properties. The initialDirectory property is used to control where the file dialog box will open.

This is something that is best left up to the script to decide, so I decided to use a variable here the same one that is passed to the function to control the initial location. A cool thing to do is to store the location in the registry and to read the value from the registry each time the function is called.

In this way, the file dialog box will always return to the last used location. The Filter property is used to configure which files are displayed in the dialog box. The filter string contains a description of the filter, followed by the vertical bar , and the filter pattern. You are allowed to have multiple filters as long as you separate each filter by a semicolon. The filter pattern I have defined is a simple one that shows all files. To show the dialog box, you call the ShowDialog method.

Because the method will return status information to the Windows PowerShell console, I pipe the return to the Out-Null cmdlet as seen here:. ShowDialog Out-Null. Windows PowerShell functions always return a value. There is little need to use the Return statement to return the value. When the filename property is neither captured in a variable nor written out, it will be returned to the calling code. This makes it easy to use the returned filename that was selected in the dialog box for other purposes.

After we have returned the file name and closed the curly brackets, the function is complete. When closing curly brackets to close out a function, I consider it to be a best practice to always include an ending comment character that states the curly bracket is ending the function and the name of the function. This practice makes your code much easier to read. The entry point to the script is simple; I pass a path to the initialDirectory parameter when I call the Get-FileName function.

When the script runs, the Open dialog box that is seen here appears:. PG, thank you for your kind words, and thank you for asking us to look at Open file dialog boxes. Join us tomorrow as graphical Windows PowerShell week continues. If you want to know what we will be looking at tomorrow, follow us on Twitter or Facebook. If you have any questions, send e-mail to scripter microsoft. See you tomorrow. Until then, take care and happy scripting. Comments are closed.

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Gets or sets the current file name filter string, which determines the choices that appear in the "Save as file type" or "Files of type" box in the dialog box. The following code example uses the OpenFileDialog implementation of FileDialog and illustrates creating, setting of properties, and showing the dialog box. The example uses the Filter and FilterIndex properties to provide a list of filters for the user.