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Notify The System Of Changes

A new Windows 95-only API call notifies the system that you’ve changedsomething it should know about. The call, SHChangeNotify, is very handyin a number of cases. You might make this call in twenty different cases.This tip covers a few of the most important. The call itself has only fourparameters:

wEventId contains the flag identifying what has changed, such as:

 SHCNE_ASSOCCHANGED Changed a file type association. SHCNE_ATTRIBUTES Changed a file's attributes.SHCNE_CREATE Created a file.SHCNE_DELETE Deleted a file.SHCNE_MKDIR Created a new directory.SHCNE_RENAMEFOLDER Renamed a folder.SHCNE_RENAMEITEM Renamed an item in afolder.SHCNE_RMDIR Removed a directory.SHCNE_UPDATEDIR Updated the contents of a directory.SHCNE_UPDATEITEM Changed the properties of a printeror file.

These flags let Explorer know that something it is showing on screenmight have changed and it needs to update its display.

uFlags indicates what the next two parameters contain. Generally, you’ll want to pass SHCNF_FLUSH so that the function doesn’treturn until it has processed the call. Instead, you may want to pass SHCNF_FLUSHNOWAITso that the call returns immediately but the system continues to processthe call in the background.

dwItem1 is event specific, but for the flags you can pass null forboth of these items.

dwItem2 is event specific.

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