I want to get the system icon of a specified folder, but maybe the only way to retrieve the icon is to use SHGetFileInfo() method. The first parameter of SHGetFileInfo() method is a pointer of LPITEMIDLIST. If I only have the absolute path of the folder, how can I get the pointer according to the path?
Thank you very much!
Welcome to the wonderful world of PIDLs.
You can read more at Introduction to the Shell Namespace, but basically a PIDL is a Pointer to an item ID List. You can think of it as a linked list in contiguous memory, but instead of each node having a pointer to the next node, you instead have the cb member which is the Count of Bytes that are contained the item, so you can add that to the base address to get the next item. IDLists are terminated with an item with { cb = 0, abID = NULL }.
So, what's in these magic lits? Basically you don't care and can't know. Any IShellFolder implementation can create a new type of ID to represent its type of item in the shell namespace. The basic file system view that the Shell implements just stores the parts of the path in these lists, so you have something like "c:\" in the first one "Users\" in the next one, etc. In reality they are serialized structs (or classes) that may contain more data. But they can also represent printers, network shares, database searches (for search folders, stacks, etc).
All you really need to know is you can ask IShellFolders to give you a PIDL that represents the items they contain, and later on you can give that PIDL back to them, and other various Shell functions and interfaces, and they know how to deal with them. What SHParseDisplayName() basically does (I think) is go through the registry looking for all registered IShellFolder implementations and asks them if they know what to do with the string you pass in, and the first one to handle it makes the PIDL and gives it back.