Hello All,
We would like to handle the Windows explorer search as soon as user entered a single character. We found there is no single Win32 API to which we can hook into. Request you to share if we can handle Windows explorer search operation through Windows driver
The use case is as follows:
- Windows Explorer provides a search box for the currently opened folder.
- The user can type any string or pattern or a single character into the search box, and Windows OS will perform the default search operation.
- In our use case, if the user opens a mapped network folder (hosted on our Linux server) and initiates a search, we want to intercept and handle the search operation ourselves, returning the list of matched files.
- Currently, Windows handles the search operation on its own, opening and reading file contents one by one from our server.
This impacts performance significantly, especially for large files. We are not able to attach the Wireshark packet log - We intend to intercept the Windows Explorer search operation so that the search string entered by the user can be sent to our Linux server from our application. The server will then process the query and return the matched file list, which we would display directly in the Explorer view. This approach aims to avoid the current behavior where Windows opens, reads, and closes each file individually resulting in performance degradation, especially with large files.
- We would appreciate your guidance on how to achieve this.
- Specifically, we are looking for ways to hook into the Windows Explorer search operation, as we are currently unsure of the best mechanism to do so.
Thank you very much