What options are available for Shell32.Folder.GetDetailsOf(..,..)?

ispiro picture ispiro · Mar 13, 2014 · Viewed 13.9k times · Source

I've seen answers using GetDetailsOf() to get details about shell items, but the numbers are always magic numbers.

I've looked at the docs for both FolderItem and GetDetailsOf but found nothing. (The list in the latter is not for everything. They don't cover "Description", "Authors", nor the recycle bin delete date...)

Is there some method that will return the possible options for an item? Is it listed somewhere?

Answer

Neil C. Obremski picture Neil C. Obremski · May 6, 2016

I figured this out by accident. If you pass null into GetDetailsOf then it responds with the column names. For example, execute the following JScript with cscript:

var shellapp = WScript.CreateObject("Shell.Application");
var folder = shellapp.NameSpace("D:\\");
for (var j = 0; j < 0xFFFF; j++) {
    detail = folder.GetDetailsOf(null, j);
    if (!detail) {
        break;
    }
    WScript.Echo("[" + j + "] = " + detail);
}

On my Windows 10 system this outputs:

[0] = Name
[1] = Size
[2] = Item type
[3] = Date modified
[4] = Date created
[5] = Date accessed
[6] = Attributes
[7] = Offline status
[8] = Availability
[9] = Perceived type
[10] = Owner
[11] = Kind
[12] = Date taken
[13] = Contributing artists
[14] = Album
[15] = Year
[16] = Genre
[17] = Conductors
[18] = Tags
[19] = Rating
[20] = Authors
[21] = Title
[22] = Subject
[23] = Categories
[24] = Comments
[25] = Copyright
[26] = #
[27] = Length
[28] = Bit rate
[29] = Protected
[30] = Camera model
[31] = Dimensions
[32] = Camera maker
[33] = Company
[34] = File description
[35] = Program name
[36] = Duration
[37] = Is online
[38] = Is recurring
[39] = Location
[40] = Optional attendee addresses
[41] = Optional attendees
[42] = Organizer address
[43] = Organizer name
[44] = Reminder time
[45] = Required attendee addresses
[46] = Required attendees
[47] = Resources
[48] = Meeting status
[49] = Free/busy status
[50] = Total size
[51] = Account name

And this is quite different from Windows 2000 as detailed from Retrieving Extended File Properties. Incidentally if you pass in a different NameSpace then you're going to get different attributes. In my example, I'm asking what attributes are available for files on drive D: which could be different depending on its format.