Opening a file in windows forms

Hey,

I am having a bit of trouble with finding out how to open up a file directory at the click of a button in VC++ Windows Forms.

I know there is the openfiledialog that would open up given the right instructions but I cannot have a menu bar at the top, so I need to be able to do this by a button click.

If anyone could help that would be great, thanks!

You mean you want to open the OpenFileDialog in response to a button click instead of the invocation of a menu item? That's no problem, the dialog is in no way predetermined to only be used in conjunction with menus. Just set up your open file dialog object and call its ShowDialog() method, that's about it. BTW, the sample code on the MSDN page on the OpenFileDialog class does exactly that.

If you want to open the file without using the open file dialog, the first question to answer is: How then do you want to acquire the file path instead?

I have tried what is on the MSDN page, maybe I am not declaring something properly, as I am getting out a LOT of errors, most talking about identifiers not being declared or the like. Tried looking around the net aswell to see if there were other example codes I could look at and tweak but so far nothing has came up.

What I had done was try and put the code in after the button click event handler, although now I am presuming that is wrong, but I do not know where to declare and what to declare. On the Msdn example it says to use syntax but whenever I put that in at the begining it overwrites what is there originally and thus causes errors in parts of the program where it shouldn.t.

Ok, the sample doesn't mention that it needs an additional

Code:

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using namespace System::IO;

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for the Stream class to be available. Aside from that it shouldn't be problematic.

I have attached a sample project (a simple text file viewer) that contains a button click handler which does the majority of the program's work and is tightly based on the MSDN sample:

Code:

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void Form1::button1_Click( Object^ /*sender*/, System::EventArgs^ /*e*/ )
{
  Stream^ myStream;
  OpenFileDialog^ openFileDialog1 = gcnew OpenFileDialog;

  openFileDialog1->InitialDirectory = "c:\\";
  openFileDialog1->Filter = "txt files (*.txt)|*.txt|All files (*.*)|*.*";
  openFileDialog1->FilterIndex = 1;
  openFileDialog1->RestoreDirectory = true;

  if ( openFileDialog1->ShowDialog() == System::Windows::Forms::DialogResult::OK )
  {
    if ( (myStream = openFileDialog1->OpenFile()) != nullptr )
    {
      // Insert code to read the stream here.

      // Add file name without path to the form title

      Text = String::Concat("Simple Text File Viewer - ", openFileDialog1->SafeFileName);

      // Write complete file path to file path text box

      txtFilePath->Text = openFileDialog1->FileName;

      // Load text file contents into viewer text box:

      txtText->Text = (gcnew StreamReader(myStream))->ReadToEnd();

      myStream->Close();
    }
  }
}

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Note, however, that I implemented the event handlers in a Form1.cpp file rather than the .h file as the IDE sets it up. This is generally considered better style (at least in native C++) and has advantages when building the project (though some of them only really pay for larger projects).