Starting applications in Explorer with associated files

I have written my application to be able to read model data files via the open file dialog, drag/drop and from the command line in a DOS window. All of these methods of model data entry work fine. I then take the root file name and use different extensions like .log and .res to create log, and results files associated with the original model file. In windows explorer I can also open the application by clicking on the model data file. However I have found that with the explorer method the model file name is passed to the application using the library function COMMAND_LINE which works fine except that long file names get shortened to the old 8.3 file name format and subsequently the log and results files use this shortened eight character file name instead of the original long file name, thus losing their associativity. This becomes a problem when I re-visit the model, as the application doesn’t find the existing results file. The confusing thing is, if I start the application from a DOS window command line with the file name appearing after the application name, long file names in this case do not get shortened.

I realise that the problem probably lies with windows and not FTN95, as the application is handed an equivalent command line (with shortened names) by explorer, but is there any setting in windows that can prevent this happening or is there a method I could use to convert a short 8.3 file name back to its long name ?

John,

I've just tried it on a Windows 2000 system and I don't get the problem, but as I am not allowed to associate file extensions on this machine, I was going through the procedure of double clicking and associating each time which worked here for each single single attempt.

However, I would like to comment that the file name was returned in quotation marks (') and caused a crash when the OPEN statement was issued. So I simply removed the quotes and it opened.

Next I tried using the inquire command as in Inquire(file=file_name,name=inq_name)

This returned the full path of the file_name as inq_name but translated to uppercase.

Opening the file as say unit=10 and then using the inquire command as Inquire(unit=10,name=inq_name) returned the filename unaltered, i.e. still in lower case.

You might try this on your computer and see what happens. Code follows

Regards

Ian

      program test_start
      character*256 file_name,inq_name

      call command_line(file_name)
      print *,trim(file_name)

      call remove_specific_chars(file_name,''')
      print *,trim(file_name)

      inquire(file=file_name,name=inq_name)
      print *,trim(inq_name)

      open(unit=10,file=file_name,status='readonly')
      inquire(unit=10,name=inq_name)
      print *,trim(inq_name)

      end
      subroutine remove_specific_chars(text,chars)
      character*(*) text,chars
      character*1 chr
!c
!c remove specific characters from text string
      ilen = leng(text)
      iout = 0
      do 10 i=1,ilen
        if(index(chars,text(i:i)) .eq. 0)then
           iout = iout + 1
           chr = text(i:i)
           text(iout:iout) = chr
        endif
   10 continue
      if(iout .lt. ilen)text(iout+1:)= ' '
      return
      end

Hi Ian,

Thank you for responding. I was already removing the quotation marks. I work on both XP and Win2K machines and the same problem occurs on both. Some how Win2K on my machine does manage to associate the file extension to my application, but it doesn't list it !!!! Anyway I was able to delete the association by searching for and deleting the extension in regedit. Then when I clicked on the relevant file in explorer, I was asked for an application to open it with. This worked fine, the long file name was not shortened. :lol: I closed the application, then doubled clicked again on the file in explorer. This time explorer did not ask for an application but proceeeded to open the file with my application straight away, only this time the long file name reverted back to the shortened 8.3 naming convention !!!! :x

At this point I did a google search, which yielded simple visual basic and csharp routines to convert short to long and vice versa, but no fortran (of course). However one of the visual basic routines provided the solution, a DOS dir command using the short file name as an argument returned the long file name :lol: :lol:

cheers John