How do I find and open a file in a Visual Studio 2005 add-in?

Question

I'm making an add-in with Visual Studio 2005 C# to help easily toggle between source and header files, as well as script files that all follow a similar naming structure. However, the directory structure has all of the files in different places, even though they are all in the same project.

I've got almost all the pieces in place, but I can't figure out how to find and open a file in the solution based only on the file name alone. So I know I'm coming from, say, c:\code\project\subproject\src\blah.cpp, and I want to open c:\code\project\subproject\inc\blah.h, but I don't necessarily know where blah.h is. I could hardcode different directory paths but then the utility isn't generic enough to be robust.

The solution has multiple projects, which seems to be a bit of a pain as well. I'm thinking at this point that I'll have to iterate through every project, and iterate through every project item, to see if the particular file is there, and then get a proper reference to it.

But it seems to me there must be an easier way of doing this.

Answer 1

To work generically for any user's file structure, you'll need to enumerate all the files in all the projects. This should get you started. And, well, pretty much finished :-)

    internal static string GetSourceOrInclude(bool openAndActivate)
    {
        // Look in the project for a file of the same name with the opposing extension
        ProjectItem thisItem = Commands.Application.ActiveDocument.ProjectItem;
        string ext = Path.GetExtension(thisItem.Name);
        string searchExt = string.Empty;
        if (ext == ".cpp" || ext == ".c")
            searchExt = ".h";
        else if (ext == ".h" || ext == ".hpp")
            searchExt = ".cpp";
        else
            return(string.Empty);

        string searchItemName = thisItem.Name;
        searchItemName = Path.ChangeExtension(searchItemName, searchExt);

        Project proj = thisItem.ContainingProject;
        foreach(ProjectItem item in proj.ProjectItems)
        {
            ProjectItem foundItem = FindChildProjectItem(item, searchItemName);
            if (foundItem != null)
            {
                if (openAndActivate)
                {
                    if (!foundItem.get_IsOpen(Constants.vsViewKindCode))
                    {
                        Window w = foundItem.Open(Constants.vsViewKindCode);
                        w.Visible = true;
                        w.Activate();
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        foundItem.Document.Activate();
                    }
                }

                return(foundItem.Document.FullName);
            }

        return(string.Empty);
    }

Note that it is possible for a header to be in the include path without being added to the project, so if the above fails, you could potentially look in the include paths for the containing project too. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.