HOWTO: Retrieve an Icon for a File Class Without a File

• Microsoft Win32 Application Programming Interface (API)
• Microsoft Windows 2000

SUMMARY

This article explains how to use the SHGetFileInfo API to retrieve the icon for a file class without having a specific file of that class available.

MORE INFORMATION

To do this, select the SHGFI_USEFILEATTRIBUTES flag and FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL so that the API assumes that the file exists and it will not try to look for it on disk.

For example, to find the icon associated with ".zip" files the call would look like:

   SHFILEINFO sfi;
   HIMAGELIST hil;

   ZeroMemory(&sfi,sizeof(sfi));
   hil = SHGetFileInfo(".zip",
                       FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL,
                       &sfi,
                       sizeof(sfi),
                       SHGFI_USEFILEATTRIBUTES|SHGFI_ICON);

   // hil now contains the handle to the system image list
   // containing the large icon images.
   // sfi.hIcon contains the large icon for the file. 

REFERENCES

For additional information about the SHGetFileInfo API, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q131500 HOWTO: Obtain Icon Information from an .EXE in Windows 95

Additional query words:

Keywords : kbLib kbNTOS400 kbWinOS2000 kbWinOS95 kbWinOS98 kbGrpShell
Version : WINDOWS:; winnt:
Platform : WINDOWS winnt
Issue type : kbhowto