Getting the path & filename of the open document in any Windows application

Question

Goal

Let me start with my final vision of what I'd like to be able to do first: In Windows, I'd like to be able to use a global keyboard shortcut that I define (say, Ctrl+Alt+C) to copy the full path and filename of the open document in the foreground application to the clipboard.

This would be useful to, for example, be able to subsequently paste the path & filename into an "Open File" dialog in an email client to attach that document to an email, without having to manually browse to the target document in the filesystem.

Specific Question

Now, the specific part of how to do this that I'm interested in how to implement is: How can I get the path and filename of the current "open document" of any arbitrary currently-running Windows application. (If this can't be done with any Windows application, then the next best thing would be for this to work with as many applications as possible.)

Obviously, this wouldn't apply to some applications that don't necessarily have the concept of a "currently open document" that corresponds to a file on the local filesystem, such as an email client, an IM client, or (usually) a web browser.

Application-Specific Solutions

I'm aware that it's possible to write application-specific solutions to do this. For example, the following MS Word VBA subroutine will copy the filename and path of the open document in Word to the clipboard:

Dim myDataObject As DataObject
Set myDataObject = New DataObject
myDataObject.SetText ActiveDocument.FullName
myDataObject.PutInClipboard

However, what I really want is something that will work for any of the applications on my system (or, again, for as many of them as reasonably possible) without having to try and write an application-specific solution for each one.

Idea: Recent Documents Folder

One idea: Could the Recent Documents folder (and/or its underlying Windows APIs) somehow be leveraged to help with this? It seems to have information about the same concept of "open documents" that I'm interested in here, that apparently applies across various application types. (Looking at the contents of the Recent Documents folder on my machine, I see entries in there that were apparently made for documents that I opened with various applications including MS Word, MS Excel, Eclipse, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Paint.NET, TOAD, and Notepad2.)

Preferred Solution Language

I'd prefer solutions in C# or C++ code, but I'm open to any suggestions for how to go about doing this, regardless of implementation language!

Windows 7?

Update 11/2009: Now that Windows 7 is widely available, I figured it might be coming back to this question and asking: Does Windows 7 provide any new APIs, or any other mechanism, that would help with what I'm trying to accomplish here?

Answer 1

There is no mandatory mechanism for an application to specify its open document, so this is not generically possible.

Answer 2

The best you could probably do is look at the recent documentation registry keys, and get the list of most recent documents. Some sample code for working with this data is in this CodeProject article. This is saved in:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RecentDocs

However, this isn't going to show you whether a document is currently open or not. You could potentially check the title of all open applications, since many applications put document names in their window titles, but this is not a requirement, and many applications do not do that.