his is a brief write up (download at the end of the article) about a fairly nice implementation of a Vista style breadcrumb bar control. For those of you savvy developers, you might know that I previously published shell tree, view, bubble, edit, and image controls as well as having authored a few articles in Delphi Developers Journal on working with the Windows shell.

At the request of a Delphi software shop, I sat down for couple days and of banged out this new control and demo program. Here is a snapshop of the end result:


The shell path control
Notable features of this control include, an implementation of scrollable drop down menus, fully data driven through xml and not tied to the file system, shell suggest and auto completion, configurable button styles through drawing events, and communication to function interchangeably with my other shell controls.


Optionally, files can be enumerated and filtered in the drop down menus, and default actions can be intercepted. This might allow you, for instance, to display only image files and to take your own open action when the user double clicks an image. You can even replace the system context menus with your own.

Niceties include custom drop down forms with shadows and fading effects, automatic wrapping of popup forms based on screen position, user definable shell roots (the desktop doesn’t need to be the root, you can make it your own private folder), full theme support, and a general improvements to increase the speed of all shell controls.

Large improvements were also made to all the shell controls. New methods and default behaviors for consistency and ease of use were added to the shell view and shell tree controls. Cloning has been added to the workhorse shell node class, and the problems with painting non client borders has been fixed.

Download the shell path edit demo

An announcement will be made soon about the source code availability of the this new control, the demo, and the updated shell control files.