Deep transformation of Win2000 "Position Bar" (2)

The folders for the location bar are not explicitly listed, either in the registry or anywhere else. Therefore, WIN2K/XP always use the standard location bar unless you manually or automatically create a new set of locations by using a program.

The location bar is a system-level resource. Once a set of positions is assigned to the location bar, all WIN2K/XP software will use this set of locations. This restriction means that you cannot specify a configuration for Notepad's location bar, and another configuration for the brush's position bar, and that all programs running under WIN2K/XP share the same set of locations-whether this set of locations is standard or custom. (The office exception, which can have a different set of locations, is discussed in detail later).

To specify a new set of folders for the location bar, the first step is to tell the system that you are not ready to use the default 5 locations. Create Hkey_current_user\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\policies\comdlg32\placesbar registry subkeys (Generally, The Plicies subkey may already exist, but the ComDlg32 subkey needs to be created by itself. After you create the subkey, you can see that the position bar of the Open dialog box has become blank. The Placesbar key tells Win2K you don't want to use a standard location combination, but you haven't specified your own configuration at this point.

The Placesbar subkey contains up to 5 registered entries, from Place0 to Place4. WIN2K/XP will not endorse or correctly handle Place5, Place6, or other name registration keys. The position should be specified sequentially, for example, you cannot set Place0, Place2 Miss Place1. If the location of the registry settings is messy and incomplete, the location bar displays the icon and folder name in unpredictable order.

When you add location information to a Placesbar subkey, the way you specify the folder is to provide the full pathname of the folder as a string. The type of registration data is REG_SZ (if the name of the folder is used in the environment variable, it should be REG_EXPAND_SZ).

You can specify the system folder as the location on the location bar in the registration information. System folders tend to have long paths and are not easy to remember (for example, can you immediately say the full path to My Documents?). If you want to designate My Documents or favorites as a location, you can use a numeric ID that is not specific to your system, instead of using its full pathname. Microsoft referred to this ID as csidl. Table one lists the IDs of the Win2K common system folders. For such folders, you can create a registered entry of type REG_DWORD under the Placesbar subkey and specify an ID.

Table one: Win2K system folders and their IDs
Folder	Id
Font	20
Recycle Bin	10
My computer	17
Network and dial-up connections	49
Printer	4
Collection	6
Sent to	9
My Pictures	39
History	34
Network Places	18
My Documents	5
Windows system catalog	36

Note: The ID value for table one does not apply to XP. If you are using XP, look for relevant information, or use the absolute path of the folder directly.