Question

VB.NET level: Beginner

I made a .exe using VB.NET. In this program there are many links to excel files (There are specific folders for excel files).

My problem:

Consider an excel file named as abc.xlsx, which is on my home pc. Link to this file is as follows,
D:\work\data\abc.xlsx

now for obvious reasons, this link will not be valid when I run the .exe on my work pc.
(Later I want to run this .exe on multiple pc’s)

How to solve this issue?

My thinking is to create a dynamic link which will update itself based on pc in use or to create a constant link which is independent of pc in use.

Help will be really appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

so make the path relative to the .exe

C:\myapp\myapp.exe
c:\myapp\data\abc.xslx
…

So no matter where you app is, you can get to your data like this

Dim dataFolder As String = System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(‌​).Location)
dataFolder = System.IO.Path.Combine(dataFolder,"data")
Dim theFileIwant as String = System.IO.Path.Combine(datafolder,"abc.xslx")