You may have noticed the auto completion feature in the edit controls in Microsoft’s file dialog boxes. You enter a few letters/words of the file path/file name, the edit control provides a dropdown list box with suggestions for your string.

The API that performs this trick for you is SHAutoComplete(HWND hEdit, DWORD flags);. hEdit is the handle to the edit control window. It flags a value or combination of values that controls the behaviour of the autocomplete feature.

Here’s an example:

#include  #include #pragma comment (lib, "shlwapi.lib")LRESULT CALLBACK MyDialogProc (HWND hWnd, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam){switch (uMsg){case WM_INITDIALOG:    HWND hFilePath;        CoInitialize (NULL);    hFilePath = GetDlgItem (hWnd, ID_FILEPATH);    SHAutoComplete (hFilePath, SHACF_DEFAULT);    break;case WM_DESTROY:    CoUninitialize();    PostQuitMessage (0);    break;}}