Question

I have currently the following problem. I have a directory structure like

root
 - level 1
   - level 1.1
     - level 1.2
 - level 2
   - level 2.1
 - level 3
 - level 4
   - level 4.1

from this I want to build a menu. so root will be the menu item to click on and all the level will be needed to drill down to the information you want to get.

As I’m pretty new to C# (not programming) I wanted to know if there is any help from .NET for this task. I don’t want to start to fiddel around with code that is already there…

Thanks for any input!

Answer 1

You can use the DirectoryInfo class to obtain a list of all sub-directories for a given root folder. You should the perform a recursive search on sub-directories and build your menu using that data.

Here is some code that will do the job for you, it assumes you already have a MenuStrip called menuStrip1:

public void BuildMenu()
{
    //first we get the DirectoryInfo for your root folder, this will be used to find the first set of sub-directories
    DirectoryInfo dir = new DirectoryInfo(@"C:\MyRootFolder\");//Change this

    //next we create the first MenuItem to represent the root folder, this is created using the GetMenuItem function
    ToolStripMenuItem root = GetMenuItem(dir);

    //we add our new root MenuItem to our MenuStrip control, at this point all sub-menu items will have been added using our recursive function
    menuStrip1.Items.Add(root);
}

public ToolStripMenuItem GetMenuItem(DirectoryInfo directory)
{
    //first we create the MenuItem that will be return for this directory
    ToolStripMenuItem item = new ToolStripMenuItem(directory.Name);

    //next we loop all sub-directory of the current to build all child menu items
    foreach (DirectoryInfo dir in directory.GetDirectories())
    {
        item.DropDownItems.Add(GetMenuItem(dir));
    }

    //finally we return the populated menu item
    return item;
}

Dont forget to change the root folder path!

---

NOTE: Yorye Nathan has made a good point about short-cut folders. If any of your folders is a short-cut to a parent folder this will cause an endless loop. The easiest way to solve this is to make sure your structure doesn’t contain any short-cuts. This may be an easy option for you assuming you have a specifically built structure for this application. If however, you are running this on a user-defined root folder you will want to check for these.

You could modify the GetMenuItem function as below to account for this, assuming .Net 3.5 or higher (LINQ + optional parameters):

public ToolStripMenuItem GetMenuItem(DirectoryInfo directory, List<DirectoryInfo> currentFolders = null)
{
    if (currentFolders == null)
        currentFolders = new List<DirectoryInfo>();

    currentFolders.Add(directory);

    ToolStripMenuItem item = new ToolStripMenuItem(directory.Name);

    foreach (DirectoryInfo dir in directory.GetDirectories())
    {
        if (!currentFolders.Any(x => x.FullName == dir.FullName))//check to see if we already processed this folder (i.e. a unwanted shortcut)
        {
            item.DropDownItems.Add(GetMenuItem(dir, currentFolders));
        }
    }

    return item;
}